Own website or 3rd party site

Do both, but save your best stuff for your own site. One beauty of this thing is that your content can make money for you for a long, long time -- but not if it's on somebody else's site, under their control.

Your most valuable asset is your content. Don't give away any more than you have to.

Cheers surviveunemployment.

Any other comments from anyone?

I own a lot of domain names (like over 250). My best traffic comes from a combination of the two methods you describe. Articles around the web will bring in traffic and boost your rankings. One article I wrote almost 5 years ago is STILL bringing me quality traffic and has had like 60,000 page views just on ezinearticles.

That article links to a site have barely even touched in almost 2 years. I am still ranking REALLY well in Google, still PR4) and the site averages over 2,000 hits a month. Even with my ebook buried (as in at least 3 clicks to find it) it is still selling well. Obviously, updating that ebook so it is current and marketing it again would be a good plan - just hasn't bubbled to the top of my To Do list.

Not all articles will pull this well over time, but if you get your key words right, and have quality content, you can keep boosting your site. What works well for me is to write a good article for my own site, then, reword it somewhat and post to EzineArticles. Reword slightly, then post everywhere else I can. Change it up a bit and hit Squidoo, HubPages or wherever else you can post pages. That one article is now working for you in 10 places. Rinse and repeat.

Go both ways and do even more....the more info out there for people to find, the more money you'll make.