You should use all available opportunities to obtain high quality external links, including directory listing, hiring a SEO consulting firm and using social media for its viral features.  However, I want to concentrate your attention toward one of the most important of the external link building alternatives, article syndication. 

There are several ways in which article marketing can improve your SEO.  The first is that the links will be found by the search robots on a variety of websites.  Assuming that those websites are located on unique IP addresses, this is very helpful because of the algorithms that the search engines use to determine their results listings.  Next, with content syndication, unlike some other methods of getting external links, you get to decide the exact anchor (linking) text for each link.  Third, article marketing is relatively inexpensive and easy when compared to some of the other ways of obtaining quality links.  The ease of the process can be largely attributed to the introduction of specific software to facilitate article marketing.

I write and spin about fifteeen article each week so that I really end up with the equivalent of hundreds of unique articles that I distribute to several article directories (for further distribution) or distribute directly to individual websites.  I am able to reach that level of productivity because of two essential memberships that I maintain.

One of the sites of which I am a member provides a free article spinner, available to anyone.  You may also register to use an automated submission service that is linked to the spinner.  It sends a unique version of your article to up to hundreds of different article directories.  When you first register to use the always free spinner, you can get a free trial offer to use the distribution part of the software.  There is a membership fee associated with the distribution system after the trial period ends.

My other membership is to a service that also has a built-in article spinner, but this system require membership to use the entire system rather that breaking the system into parts.  The important difference with this system is that, rather than distributing unique versions of the article to directories, those article are spun and the distributed directly to websites. 

Both approaches have their advantages, which is the reason that I maintain memberships in both.  Consequently, a combination of the two is what I would recommend for use in the SEO efforts for your mini-sites, with an added benefit of almost immediately increasing traffic.

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