Why Article Marketing is Better than PPC

Article Marketing is an often debated subject. Many people build their entire business on the ideas of article marketing, and many people think it’s a complete waste of time and money. So in this post, I want to discuss some of the merits of article marketing without necessarily trying to take any opinions or experience into account.

I admit right up front that I love article marketing, and that I’ve had huge successes with it. I have one article on Ezine Articles that has sent over 100,000 clicks to my website, and three or four more that have sent me over 20,000. I’ve tried PPC, and I’ve broken even, but I haven’t ever spent that much time learning about it because the prospect of losing a lot of money is kind of scary.

But I don’t want this to be about my experience or my opinions. I want to talk about pure, unadulterated facts.

Article marketing is a good thing because it’s fairly low risk. If you write an article that doesn’t do too much for you, then that’s fine, because all you’ve lost is the hour or so that it took you to write the article, or the $2-5 you spent to have the article written.

Article marketing is a good thing because it can bring you very economical traffic. If you were to spend one hour writing an article, and it sends you 10 visitors a month for a year, then you got two visitors per minute from the effort it took you to write an article. If you purchased the article, you’re paying less than one cent per click, and it gets even cheaper over the long term.

Article marketing is a good thing because it brings in traffic over the long term. When you pay for clicks from your PPC company, you’re getting one visitor once. When you pay to have your articles written, you’re getting results for as long as your article is still generating traffic, which for me, has lasted from the time that the article is submitted until the present day.

Article marketing is not so good because it requires a lot more effort to be put into it. You not only have to do some good keyword research (the primary component of PPC), but you have to write a full four- to five-hundred word article that effectively captures the attention of search engines and readers at the same time.

Article marketing is not so good because it’s really quite slow. Your articles will obviously need to be written, and often need to be approved before they’ll be live, and it’s only after they are crawled by spiders that they’ll be listed in search engines. Thus, it can take a few days before you start to see any results from your work. With PPC, you can be listed within five or ten minutes sometimes.

Article marketing is not so good because it can be a lot of wasted effort. If you choose keywords improperly, or submit to some lousy directories, it is unlikely that your article will bring you any traffic at all, whereas with PPC, you’re at least guaranteed to get some traffic from well-formed ads.

I think that the reason that Article marketing wins for me is simple: every time you write an article, you’re getting not only some traffic, but also some link juice. Thus, every dollar invested in article marketing is a dollar that will keep giving back as long as you maintain your websites. That link juice will build up to give you natural rankings, allowing you the financial freedom to pursue other projects. With PPC, you have to keep spending to maintain those high rankings. That’s the killer for me, and the reason that I have come to rely so heavily on article marketing for maintaining my business.

By the way, the only decent article directory that you’ll ever need is Ezine Articles. The rest are simply not worthwhile in my opinion.