Free - quality - back links is just another SEO myth. If you can't afford investing money you must consider investing time and effort.
The reason is obvious - besides building quality content that interest other marketers, you also need to run a strong promotion campaign for the community to notice your work.
The best approach is quit chasing links and focusing on creating timely content that a) interests, b) draws attention and c) builds interaction/controversy around it.
Here are some other places to look at for generating quality free back links:
1. Untapped places to syndicate content to.
2. More subtle methods of getting back links
3. Social platforms perceived as trusted link depots
1. Expanding Content Syndication Practice
The hardest part in link building is not so much the research faze as it is getting the counterpart to react positively to your proposal.
A good approach to publish your content on other related websites is by simply making your writing services available towards the webmaster; this is where you express your intention to produce a unique piece of content tailored on that targeted website's topic.
Considering that innovation is rather scarce in today's web, you might even think providing a snippet of your future work just to make the proposal sound more professional.
A solid knowledge of your niche is all that's necessary; if you lack confidence in your writing skills resort to a ghost writer to put your ideas on a notepad.
No subject comes to mind? Revise your previous writings, pick one and give it a total maker over. This further improves your site's relevancy and also promotes previous content to new readership.
The main reason to alternate content distribution with other private websites is mainly because article and press release directories fall short in areas like:
> Long time for approval and factual indexation by the search engines,
> Little to no exclusivity with hundreds of writers fighting to direct attention towards their work,
> Ephemeral existence for the gross of ADs.
Of course there are a handful of powerful article directories out there that deliver traffic right from the first day but working with the large mass can sometimes mean wasted effort.
Only target sites with strong Alexa rankings (under 100.000) and at least PR3 as shown by Google's toolbar. Also, see where best players publish their content and join them there.
2. Free back links from testimonials
When providing a testimonial, the recipient, invariably, must embed a link back to your site. If they don't, you might as well retract your feedback.
On the other hand, testimonials can also be disguised reciprocal promotions, being widely practiced between marketers that know, like and trust each other.
Don't ever make unrealistic or unverified affirmation especially on little know products that don't originate from the top marketers.
Best is to compose testimonials on products you've personally used or currently consume.
3. Social Media Platforms and Hub Pages
Social bookmarking sites are an easy-picking source for free back links, granted that you don't "succeed" in getting you accounts canceled for promoting exclusively your own content.
Top bookmarking platforms, like Digg.com have 2 simple rules for content promotion. 1) Never be self promoting and 2) never use automation.
Other social media link sources are Hubpages and Squidoo, social environments where you can create content pages discussing topics of interest for you market.
Leverage the existing ranking power of these two platforms by publishing some of your content on them then build a handful of backlinks for the new content pages and finally point these web pages back to your own website. Note: embed the back links in the actual text body to carry more weight.
If you're thinking to use private social bookmarking projects powered by open source software like Pligg and Ning, don't waste your time. It takes forever for them to get indexed and even when they do, they maintain rankings.
If you're using submission software, filter out these types of platforms and focus on only the established services mentioned above.
Article Directory : http://www.articlecube.com
