From your "a year on" article:

"Getting backlinks

There are still hardly any backlinks to the site and I don't really know how to boost this efficiently. I was thinking about licensing the content under Creative Commons as I've noticed a couple of sites just copy and pasting my articles in without even a link back."

Did you try contacting the sites and ask them to provide a backlink? Seems like a very reasonable request that most would comply with.