I’ve run into 3 PR type article marketing systems. These alternatives allow spinning, so be aware. You don’t have to spin your submissions if you don’t want to, but you won’t get as many links from one submission so it might not be as cost effective.
All of these services are free to sign up for, and don’t require a credit card to sign up. You get some free submissions with Article Ranks and Free Traffic System, then can pay for more submissions as you go or monthly, or earn credits other ways. You can add your blogs to the network to receive submissions. Article Ranks and Free Traffic System allow you to choose which content gets added to your site, EZArticleLink doesn’t have any control though. (But you can put it on a subdomain if you want to segregate it from the rest of your site.)
Free Article Marketing Services/Guest Posting Markets:
Free to sign up. Get up to 35 free submissions by signing up social accounts (can be dummy ones if you want). You can submit to top level categories for free. Better focus will cost you extra.
You can add your own blogs to their system. You get credits for submissions to your blogs if the root domain is at least PR1. I haven’t had much experience with this yet, but you can choose what content to publish. As can any other blog owner in the system, so quality is better than general article directories.
Free Traffic System is free to sign up for, and there are a large number of blogs which are free to submit to. Blog owners can set the price for submitting to their blog, and can reject submissions according to whatever criteria they set. You can add your own blog to the system and set your own price. The better blogs usually charge higher prices. When selecting a blog to purchase a submission to, you only send one article (can be spun or not, but needs to be approved), so it’s essentially a market for guest posting.
To get credits you either add your own blog to the system and accept submissions for the agreed upon price, or you can buy credits from FTS to use. At the very least you can get several hundred blog submissions for free though!
EZArticleLink is somewhat different than the other services. You have to submit a blog to the service to use it for free. Then you don’t get to choose what content will be submitted to your blog either. This means you know for sure how many links you are getting when you submit, but quality is going to be lower.
The good thing is you can choose to accept submissions to one blog, but only send out submissions linking to your other blog. This is a 1:1 thing, so for every blog you have in the system, you can link to another domain of your choosing. For a price you can increase the number of blogs you can link to, or you can simply put more of your blogs into the system.
Some other good (and free) backlink resources:
Essentially a free fiverr blast to blog comments or forums. So why not try it? The thing I really like about this service is it’s no frills and very easy to set up. You put the URLs you want (up to 10000) into one box, you put the keywords you want (up to 10000?) into the other box. You choose how many you want to submit each day, and how many total links you want for the project. Everything else is automatic.
You get 1000 credits free for signing up, and each credit is good for a link. From forums I get about 1.2 links per credit so far (they over submit to make up for denied links). For blogs I get .03 links per credit as the blog owners can deny the comments so there isn’t a good success rate. They have over a thousand forums so far, and over a million blogs to comment on. More are added all the time.
Credits cost $1 per 1000 credits, so you are getting roughly 1200 forum links (these are actual threads, not profiles) for $1 after your free credits are used up.
They have a referral program you can use to get 1000 credits per signup, and a % of any money spent buying new credits by your referrals.
SocialADR is a free service where you add your social accounts (can be dummies) to get bookmarks and tweets and +1′s and the like from other users of the service. The links are easy to set up, can be spun if you want but don’t have to be, and you can choose how many times they will get submitted.
You earn credits by submitting other user’s links to your own accounts. Or you can buy them piecemeal or on a monthly plan. The monthly plans are fully automatic once you have your links set up, so you can just fire and forget.
The prices are quite competitive with what you’d find on fiverr for these types of services, or you can just stick to the free account which ends up being about 20-40 social links a day in practice.