Three digital editors.One agency. Eleven years.
Two website rebuilds. 2018, then April 2023. The April 2023 build is still live.
5.8x referring-domain growth. 30k–45k organic clicks a month. 749 to 4,369 ref domains, peak Nov 2025.
- Engagement
- September 2014 – November 2025
- Eleven years. Concluded when LINKS Magazine transitioned digital responsibilities to a new agency in November 2025.
- Domain Rating · Ahrefs
- 61 → 67 → 64
- 61 in early 2018. Peaked at 67 in mid-2025. Dropped to 64 within four months of departure. Currently 65.
- Organic clicks · monthly
- 30,000 – 45,000
- Against 2 to 3.6 million monthly impressions. Stable across the engagement window.
- Referring domains · concurrent
- 749 → 4,369
- Ahrefs concurrent referring domains, Jan 2018 to Nov 2025 peak. 5.8x growth across the engagement. Slight pullback to 4,062 in Dec 2025 after agency change.
- Lead generation · 2017
- 5,500+ qualified leads
- Facebook lead-gen program. Average cost per lead $2.27. Roughly one-fifth of the $10–$15 industry rate-card cost for purchased golf-audience names.
- Sponsor campaigns executed
- Dozens · including:
- Golf Pride, Motocaddy, PING, Mayacama, Duca del Cosma, Dormie Network, Blackstone at Vistancia, PerryGolf, TaylorMade, Bridgestone, and many more across the engagement.
Not a vendor that could push pixels. A digital operator that could run the whole stack.
In September 2014, the digital side of the business looked the way most legacy print publications looked at the time. WordPress was running on a previous hosting vendor's infrastructure. Ad operations were largely manual. Lead acquisition for the LINKSdigital email newsletter ran on rented and purchased lists, which were expensive and produced uneven quality.
What LINKS needed wasn't a vendor that could push pixels. It needed a digital operator that could run the whole stack: hosting, security, performance, SEO, ad ops, email infrastructure, lead generation, and reporting. One throat to choke. One partner that understood publishers.
That's what Digital1010 built. For eleven years.
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List buying cost $10–$15 per name. We delivered names for $2.27.
| Month · 2017 | New leads | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|
| March 2017 | 1,152 | $1.74 |
| April 2017 | 954 | $2.09 |
| May 2017 | 865 | $2.31 |
| June 2017 | 729 | $2.60 |
| July 2017 | 845 | $2.36 |
| August 2017 | 783 | $2.55 |
| Six-month total | 5,328 | $2.27 avg |
The program ran for years beyond 2017. The owned audience compounded. The cost of acquisition kept the email database growing without continuing to fund the list-broker industry.
If you're running a media business and paying for cold lists, this is a conversation we should have.
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Hosted, patched, backed up, and rebuilt twice. Eleven years of continuous WordPress operation.
The first redesign launched in 2018, modernizing the front-end and tightening the editorial publishing workflow as the site transitioned out of its older architecture. The second redesign launched in April 2023, a full rebuild that became the foundation the site is still running on today. It included a clean editorial layout, a sponsor-friendly ad inventory architecture, and the SEO foundation that drove the Domain Rating to its peak.
When a contributing photographer flagged a malware alert in mid-2024, we ran a manual scan, confirmed the site was clean, and resolved the false positive the same day. That's the cadence of an embedded operator, not a vendor on a ticket queue.
Full-site website takeovers. Creative trafficking, link tagging, end-of-flight reconciliation.
The Looker Studio reporting dashboards we built for advertisers like PerryGolf were referenced approvingly in client emails. When campaigns came in with assets out of spec, like HTML5 ads that didn't meet Google's specs or creatives at three times the required dimensions, we either fixed them ourselves or quarterbacked the conversation with the advertiser's creative team.
The technical foundation we built allowed LINKS Magazine to sell sponsorship inventory with confidence in delivery and measurement.
A partial list of brands whose sponsor campaigns and website takeovers Digital1010 executed on LINKS Magazine. Motocaddy, Mayacama, Duca del Cosma, and Blackstone at Vistancia campaigns also ran during the engagement; clean SVG marks weren’t available at publish time and were omitted rather than rendered at lower fidelity.
Referring domains 5.8x. Domain Rating 61 to 67. Both broke when we left.
The mid-2024 inflection is the part to look at. The link acquisition didn't plateau in years six or seven; it accelerated. Referring domains went from roughly 1,400 to over 2,000 in two months, then doubled again across 2025 to the all-time peak of 4,369 in November. Then the engagement closed, and Ahrefs registered a pullback the next month.
Site traffic settled into 30,000 to 45,000 organic clicks per month against 2 to 3.6 million monthly impressions. The editorial archive accumulated topical authority across golf course rankings, travel features, equipment reviews, and player profiles. This isn't the kind of growth that happens in a 12-month engagement. It's the kind of growth that happens when an embedded digital operator stays for a decade and lets the work compound.
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Three editors. Three working styles. One agency on the other end.
- Editor 01
Tony Giovannini
September 2014Tony was the digital editor when the relationship started. We built the working systems together.
- Editor 02
Graylyn Loomis
Mid-2010s – Summer 2019Graylyn took the role through the back half of the 2010s and ran the digital operation until he left for a new opportunity in North Carolina.
- Editor 03
Al Lunsford
Late 2019 – November 2025Al stepped in late 2019 and remained the primary point of contact through the end of the engagement in 2025.
The trajectory broke. The foundation didn't.
The site's Domain Rating dropped from 67 in mid-2025 to 64 by year-end, a three-point decline within four months of the agency change. As of May 2026, it has recovered partially to 65, but the trajectory broke. The compounding link acquisition and content authority work Digital1010 had been running stopped, and Ahrefs reflects it.
At the same time, the SEO foundation we built continues to perform. The site is still delivering 30,000 to 45,000 organic clicks per month. The editorial archive, site architecture, schema, and internal linking remain in place and continue to drive traffic.
This is what we mean when we talk about digital work that becomes the client's asset. We built LINKS Magazine a foundation that survives our involvement. The growth pace changed when the daily operating partner changed, but the foundation is still doing its job.
Three ways to start the conversation.
Digital1010 is a senior team based in Jacksonville, Florida. We don't take on more than a small number of new engagements per year because the work we do is embedded, long-horizon, and operationally deep. We're not the agency that ships a project and disappears. We're the agency that becomes your digital operator and lets the work compound.
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