As an online marketer, I have researched and looked at various marketing strategies to attract traffic and convert that traffic into members and paying customers. While I have been using article marketing for many years, I have also taken a look at, researched, and tried pay per click marketing (PPC) as an alternative. These are the some of the pros and cons I see with these marketing methods, and you can decide for yourself, which strategy may be the best for you.
Learning How To Do Article Marketing Versus Pay Per Click
Article marketing is great for beginners because there isn’t that much of a learning curve. You just have to be able to write something about your topic and publish it somewhere. Preferably where there is a lot of traffic. Learning how to publish articles is simple these days because there are so many article directories where they do all the work, all you have to do is write and submit.
If you choose to learn pay per click, there is a bit of a steeper learning curve. You have to know what keywords to target, how to write a good ad, and you need to make sure that you target keywords that are in your budget (for example 3¢ per click versus 12¢ per click). Of course there is an “art” to using both. You need to learn certain tricks of the trade to maximize the potential of using either strategy, but writing articles about things you already know is easier than writing ads that make people want to click on them. That’s called copywriting — and that is a separate skill on its own which people take years to master.
The Cost Of Article Marketing Versus Pay Per Click
One of the huge allures to article marketing for most folks is that there is only an investment of time. No money. Which is great when you are on a shoestring budget or you are testing various marketing methods. You can write the articles yourself. You can publish them for free to various high-traffic sources. Also, if you write an article that fails to bring you traffic, all you have done is wasted about 30 minutes of your time writing.
With pay per click, there is a definite investment of cash, because the whole idea is that you are paying for traffic. You run your classified ad, and everytime someone clicks on your ad and travels to your website, you pay the company that runs the ad for you (Google Adwords or Yahoo). What you pay for the “clicks” is based on the popularity of the keywords that you use. So if it costs 7¢ per click to run an ad with the keyword of “Dog Training” and you get 1000 clicks in one month, then you will pay $70 for that one ad. Just one. If that ad doesn’t work, then you’ve lost $70 that month.
How Hard Do You Have To Work Using Article Marketing vs. Pay Per Click?
One of the attractions to PPC marketing is the fact that you can attract traffic almost overnight. Once you have your ad live, people can click and come visit your site. So the effort is minimal, once you’ve done the initial work of writing the right ad for your market. Sounds a bit easier than writing 25 articles and waiting for the traffic to come in huh? Well not necessarily.
While you may need to write and publish a good amount of articles to bring in a steady stream of traffic, you certainly don’t have to “wait” for the traffic. Luckily for entrepreneurs in this day and age, you can PUSH your articles in front of existing traffic. This is done via social media sites, and the traffic comes instantly.
So as you can see, there are many ways to get traffic. You can attract it. You can buy it. Or you can step in front of it. One way is free and the other can cost you. I’ve used both and have found that they both have their strengths and weaknesses, but as an overall long-term strategy, I have and continue to choose article marketing.
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yup, for a long-term strategy i prefer article marketing. PPC can be used to test your campaign to determine which keywords are profitable