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If you have spent any amount of time in the link building world, you will note that it takes some serious time to really rally up and start gaining some momentum in the search engines and start to see things pick in terms of where you are ranking in the SERPs.

This is especially true with very competitive keyword phrases. Jumping from page three to page two, and from page two to page one can be very tough in a competitive niche - even when you are link building at a very high scale (however jumping from - say - page eleven to page eight is considerably easier).

Link building and Relationship management (sometimes public relations is a part of it) software is supposed to help you keep track of these relationships. With it, you are able to build a humungous database of contacts, and you are able to keep track of where all your links are coming from.

In an article I have previously written on this website, I describe the benefits of using a system like this. The particular software I was talking about in this case was called Buzzstream, and you can find that article here.

The Cons of Using These Types of Software

One of the things that makes this type of software awesome, is that you are able to outsource your link building to employees or freelancers (all over the world if need be) quite easily and keep track of every single move they make when they are link building. This is especially useful if you run an SEO company and you have to keep track of all of your employees link building efforts.

So a link building software is almost absolutely necessary when you are running a company and have to monitor the actions of many different people. It is also very cost effective. But what if it is only you doing the link building or if the work is spread throughout a number of people? Is it still absolutely necessary to use this type of software?

Let's summarize what link building software is used for:

• keeping track of SEO metrics e.g. Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and IP address
• Keeping track of conversations held with prospects
• Creating a database filled with link partners and potential prospects (maybe the best use for it)
• Mass emailing and outreach

There are many other things that a good link building and public relations management software is good for but these are the main points. I'm here to tell you, that you do not need link building software that costs upwards of $100 a month to keep track of all of these different metrics. And in many cases, it can actually be counterproductive. Let me explain.

Data entry can be a tedious everyday task for a link builder. And one might think that they could solve this problem by using a software program to keep track of the little things. This is flat out just not the case however.

When you are using a link building software there are many fields and types of data that you will still have to plug in. And you will also spend a lot of your dear time organizing prospects, filtering through fields, and spending time with general organization. Many of the times you actually spend more time organizing a link building campaign then you do doing the actual link building.

And the fact is you don't need it because there are many other free tools out there that can get the job done. And even though it is superbly nice to have all that data right there in front of you that you can pull out at any time, it is a lot less efficient then using the ultimate tool that we as human beings have in this world: Our brain. The truth be told, our memory is much more useful when it comes to building links on a lot of sites by yourself or with one other worker (a lot more cost effective as well). Together with an organized email account, spreadsheets or Google Docs, and a file and folder sharing program like DropBox, you will everything you need to pull off an amazing link building campaign all by yourself with only time being your investment. And we all know that time is money.