The hard part of outreach turned out to be the replies

We've been doing link building and mention outreach with a small SEO agency since August.

I expected the hard part to be finding pages and getting anyone to answer. It wasn't. site owners reply. A lot of them. faster than a small team can keep up with.

The other surprise was price. sites with similar metrics that aren't on any marketplace often ask $30-50 for a mention. the agency used to pay $300-350 through marketplaces. nobody ever told those owners what the "market rate" is.

So now the bottleneck is the boring part. answering every reply, agreeing on terms, checking the mention actually went live.

Anyone else hit this? how do you handle replies when it's hundreds of conversations, not ten?