7 Free and Cheap Backlink Tools, Services
Building Backlinks On A Budget
As internet marketers we should be not only be focusing on the quality of the backlinks that we are driving to our site(s), but also taking into consideration the aspect of the time spent acquiring backlinks, as well as the monetary investment required. Ideally, I am searching for maximum quality, variety and cost-effectiveness in relation to the time spent on the activity.
While this is by no means a complete list as there are a nearly infinite number of ways to get quality backlinks to your site with little to no money, here are some of the cheap and/or free linkbuilding tools, services and activities that I am personally using at this time:
Linklicious – An extremely effective resource for time spent/cost of service. Before utilizing Linklicious.me I hadn’t realized just how few backlinks were actually getting crawled (and even fewer still that were getting indexed). For a small investment of $14.50 each month in a basic membership, I am able to dramatically speed up the time needed to get all of my main backlinks crawled along with my new posts/content. A great overall value.
High Authority Backlinks – Free to utilize (unless you outsource the content creation), submitting articles to sites like Ezine Articles, Hubpages, The Free Library, Squidoo, Amazines and Odiogo is still an essential activity for creating some high authority backlinks. While this can be somewhat time consuming, or costly if you outsource, it will still end up being money/time extremely well spent.
WP Syndicator Plugin – This is one of my favorite new WordPress premium plugins. The set it and forget it plugin syndicates all of my posts/content to 11 social networking sites including Twitter, Live Journal and Tumblr as an excerpt or short post along with a backlink to my original content. It takes a bit of time initially to create the different profiles across the sites, but for a tool that syndicates your content across high authority sites on 100% auto-pilot for a low one-time cost, the the effort is highly worthwhile. Best practices tip: For an added boost I submit each of my social networking blogs/profile to Linklicious to ensure the new content/links are getting crawled.
Ultra-Spinnable Minis – Ultra Spinnable Minis from The Leading Articles are actually a “lite” version of their Ultra Spinnable Articles premium membership.You’ll receive one 100% Uniquely written, spin-ready article of approximately 475-500 words delivered to your inbox each business day. These articles are available in a variety of different niches and provide unique content for a variety of web properties useful for your different marketing needs, including submission to article directories and web 2.0 sites for backlinking. The cost is $17 per month for 20 articles (about $1.17 per article), and you can create dozens of variations of each of those articles. A great service and highly recommended.
Social Monkee – With a free Social Monkee account you can get up to 25 dofollow social bookmarks every day. As as premium member you have the ability to bookmark up to 3 URLs across 100 social bookmarking sites per day. While it does require a little bit of daily effort to submit the spun titles, description and tags, the ability to get 25 free backlinks (or 300 backlinks with a one-time $47 premium membership) can save you a ton of money over time.
NeoBookmark – NeoBookmark.net lets you bookmark your URLs on more than 1000 social bookmarking sites.I recently signed up for the $10 per month service which gives me 5000 credits each month. As an example 1 credit = submission to one site without captcha. NeoBookmark has an easy to navigate interface that allows you to follow your submissions from your dashboard, as well as view reports and submit new jobs. As with Social Monkee, you will want to take the time to spin your titles and descriptions for maximum effectiveness.
PRLog – PRLog.org is a free to use press release distribution service that Google seems to pay a good deal of attention to. Take a few minutes to register an account at PRLog and click “Submit Press Release”. You can then create your press release, which can actually be anything from a simple announcement to a brief review or article. You will then have the option to add additional information such as your company profile, tags, etc. PRLog press releases often show up on the first page of Google for your chosen keyword phrase within just a few minutes. This can be a great way to drive quick traffic while also generating some quality backlinks. Keep in mind however that you might not be able to have a backlink with your desired anchor text. In order to add hyperlinks with anchor text you will need to upgrade to their paid service.
My basic approach is to mix my backlinking activities as much as possible, not really worrying too much about whether the backlinks are in my niche or coming from high Page Rank sites. Personally, I have too many other areas of my online business that I need to keep working on like site building and content generation.
