Worked example
A $500 link building budget for a SaaS with no revenue yet, as a worked example
The product, the numbers and the results below are made up. Only the price range and the process come from how the marketplace works.
Meet an imaginary founder with a two-month-old invoicing tool for freelance translators. No such company exists. We invented the traffic, the dates and the spend to show how the reasoning goes.
The starting position
Our imaginary founder has a home page, a pricing page and one comparison page against a bigger invoicing tool. Search Console shows 400 impressions a week on the comparison page and 12 clicks. Paying customers: none yet.
The budget is $500, to be spent over three months, with no single order above $60. A rule like that stops one tempting row from eating the plan.
How the $500 could be split
| Month | Action | Spend | What gets recorded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Month 1, week 1 | Fix the comparison page; submit to free directories | $0 | Date of each listing and its link attribute |
| Month 1, week 4 | Three placements to the comparison page, mid-priced niche rows | $90 | Donor, price, live date |
| Month 2 | Review Search Console; add two more only if impressions moved | $0 to $100 | Impressions, clicks, sign-ups per week |
| Month 3 | Two placements to the pricing page or a second comparison page | $100 to $150 | Same columns, new URL |
| Reserve | Left unspent unless a result justifies it | $160 to $310 | A written reason before spending |
What the example teaches
Most of the money stays unspent
The plan is built to stop early. If nothing moves after the first batch, the cheap thing to learn is that the page, not the number of links, needs work.
- Spend in small batches
- Review before every new batch
- Keep a reserve on purpose
What the founder reads in Search Console (hypothetical)
After six weeks the imaginary comparison page shows 900 impressions a week instead of 400, and 30 clicks. That would be encouraging, not proof. A seasonal bump, a new blog post or plain luck could produce the same chart.
Control pages help. So the founder compares against a page with no new links. If the control page also rose, the links get less credit. If only the linked page rose, they get some, though never all of it. Keep the claim modest in both cases.
The numbers here are made up. The habit of keeping a control page is real advice, and it costs nothing.
And if the founder had $100 instead
Then one batch of two or three rows to the comparison page, nothing else. Pair it with the free listings from the directory guide and the checks in the launch checklist.
And if it were $1,000? The same shape holds. Wider spread across more URLs, still reviewed batch by batch, and the price ranges help you avoid putting the whole sum on one row.
Questions this example raises
- Why not spend the whole $500 in week one?
- Because you would have no data to steer the second batch. Spreading spend lets one batch inform the next, and it limits the damage if the page, not the links, was the weak point.
- Is a link building budget like this enough?
- For a test, yes. For a lasting effect, nobody can say, and results depend on niche, page quality and competition. Treat the budget as the price of learning, not of a ranking.