Link Building Without Breaking the Bank

Link building is one of those SEO topics many professionals prefer to avoid. It’s less about analysis and insights and more about outreach. And for that, you need leads.

But buying leads is expensive. Subscribing to tools like Postega or Respona can be even worse, running $99 to $199 per month. So what’s a fledgling SEO pro to do? Connect a few solid tools together, of course.

The solution starts with Hunter.io, a lightweight email outreach tool that supplements basic lead info. It also generates niche lead lists through dropdown filters. The next step is to connect it to google sheets and a gmass browser extension.

Here’s a short video that walks through Hunter.io basics.

Once you obtain the leads you want, you can download them as a CSV and upload the data to a Google Sheet.

I haven’t tried this yet, but you could probably build a lightweight MCP agent to fetch relevant personalization data. Advanced MCP setups can use AI to enrich leads and even generate content or campaign suggestions. For an ambitious example, check out “Revolutionizing Outbound Sales: Why I Built a Natural Language Lead Generation MCP Server”.

Some setups even use Zapier MCP agents and Apify scrapers to send lead data directly to HubSpot or other CRMs. But I digress. Here is another example

Back to my project: once I’ve cleaned up the data in Google Sheets, I use the GMass browser extension to run a mail merge campaign. It allows me to send personalized emails to everyone on my list, all at once, complete with merge fields for names, companies, and custom introductions. (See images below.).

Select your Google Sheets leads file using the extension:

Configure settings before you send off your email. Run tests first.

This setup is still pretty basic, but it saves me a ton of money. Once i start rolling, I’ll probably add in MCP capabilities if they substantially help.