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Honestly, if  SEO is important to your business I think you may want to hire a SEO, rather than trying to have your assistant do it. I don't mean to sound harsh, but that could be your first failure point. Ultimately the first step in linkbuilding is to answer the question "Why should a site link to you, and not any other equivalent sites?" This is where the content creation comes from -- giving people a reason to link to you, a reason you're site is unique and awesome, authoritative or entertaining or whatever makes you stand apart. Then you do your outreach. If you got step 1 down, you should get a lot more than 1 out of every 100 related sites to link to you.