Traffic Poll

Article marketing and guest posting are the same thing, really. (Or "guest posting" is one example of "article marketing", I should say). Anyway, I put those two first equal by a very big margin (surprise surprise - that's how I make a living).

And then a huge gap down to blog commenting and forum marketing (which, again, are pretty similar to one another), and paid traffic (can be great, and scalable).

Then SEO a long way behind again, at the end of the list, not only because it's the most precarious but also because it tends to be the worst-quality traffic as well. I happen to get floods of it (because it can be a side-benefit of article marketing, which I've been doing for nearly 4 years), but I'd certainly hate to try to make a living from it. Visitors from search engines, in every niche throughout my entire business, stay less time, view fewer pages, opt-in less often and buy anything far less often than any other kind of traffic I get.

(I left out social media traffic because I have no experience of it and comparatively little interest in it).

Blog commenting is pretty similar to forum marketing, really: both rest on the principle of adding value to a page which the people you want to attract are already visiting, and getting clicks on your context-relevant link from it. (And both even have an SEO side-benefit, because the site on which your backlink appears is a relevant one to your own, so the backlink actually has some linkjuice for you, too).