How Lexio Digital Landed 5 Backlinks in 5 Weeks for an American-Made Grill Brand

Chiasson Smoke makes charcoal grills, rocket stoves and smokers in the U.S. and ships them nationwide. Its link building is run by Lexio Digital, a digital marketing agency in Madison, Wisconsin, where Jacob Knotek handles the outreach.

Jacob added Chiasson Smoke to Mentiohunt on October 1, 2026. About five weeks later, the brand had 5 new live backlinks, a dozen conversations still open, and two or three more links close to agreed. This case study covers how those links came in, including what they cost.

Where Chiasson Smoke started

Outdoor cooking is a crowded niche on search. Chiasson Smoke's competitor list included Weber, Traeger, Solo Stove and Breeo, brands with years of reviews, gift guides and roundups pointing at them. Its target keywords were broad, commercial ones: "charcoal grill," "portable grill," "camping grill," "rocket stoves."

For an agency, prospecting a niche like this by hand is the expensive part of the job. Finding the pages, checking who runs them, and writing an email that fits each one takes hours before a single reply comes back. That is the part Lexio Digital handed to Mentiohunt, keeping the conversations for itself.

The approach

Mentiohunt runs its discovery methods every day. For Chiasson Smoke, they found 375 opportunities: pages that already linked to a competitor, listicles and gift guides about outdoor cooking, sites that accept guest posts, resource pages and a few unlinked mentions of the brand.

Mentiohunt emailed 204 of those sites, signed by Jacob, 2.4 emails per site on average, each one pointing to the Chiasson Smoke page that fit the article: a charcoal grill collection, a product page or a how-to post from the brand's blog. When a site replied, the sequence stopped and Jacob took the conversation over.

Here's the email behind the free link, with the site's details removed:

Subject: Could you link the Chiasson Smoke mention?

Hi there,

Thanks for mentioning Chiasson Smoke on your [page name]. If useful, I'm
happy to give [site name] a shoutout on our blog too. Would you mind linking
the mention to https://www.chiassonsmoke.com?

Best,
Jacob

The site didn't answer the first email. It answered the follow-up five days later, about a minute after it arrived, with one word: "Added."

The results

The first link went live 18 days after Jacob signed up, and the fifth on November 4. The median replying site had a Domain Rating of 39, and 5 of the replies came from DR 50+ sites.

Here's where the replies came from:

Guest post pitches had the best reply rate, and pages that already linked to a competitor brought in the most replies overall. Unlinked mentions were only 5 emails, but they produced the free link.

One free link, four paid ones

Only 9 of the 25 replying sites quoted a price. That's about a third, well below the roughly 2 in 3 across all Mentiohunt outreach, so outdoor cooking turned out to be a friendlier niche than most.

Of the five live links, one was free: the unlinked mention above. The other four were link insertions in existing articles that Jacob chose to pay for, priced between $30 and $150. On one, he negotiated: the site asked $150 and agreed to $130. Jacob also picked the article and wrote the sentence the link sits in every time, so each link landed on a page about outdoor cooking, food or family trips.

This is where having an agency person in the loop matters. Mentiohunt never pays or negotiates on your behalf. It labels price quotes in the dashboard so you can see them at a glance, and the decision stays with whoever owns the conversation. All four paid links are in Mentiohunt's link tracker, which re-checks them every day and flags any link that gets removed or goes nofollow.

What this doesn't prove

This is one brand in one niche over five weeks. A 12% reply rate and five links aren't a promise for any other site, and four of the five links were paid placements Jacob chose to buy. Only one was free.

What it does show is that an agency can hand the prospecting and first-touch outreach to Mentiohunt and spend its own time on the part that needs a person: deciding which offers are worth it, negotiating, and checking the result. Jacob still has 12 conversations open, and two or three more links are close to agreed.

Try it yourself

Lexio Digital ran Chiasson Smoke the same way any Mentiohunt product runs: add the site, its competitors and its keywords, let the daily discovery methods fill the queue, and take over when someone replies. If you run link building for clients, see how it works for e-commerce brands.