Traffic. Paid Or FREE?

Hi all

In the past i have used both PPC and SEO to get traffic to my blogs and websites. But ill ask you, what do you all believe is the best way to succeed online via paid or free traffic, or is it both?

Traffic is essential to any online business, wether its an adsense site, affiliate site, your own product, or your very own content filled site with your own ad network.

If you where to ask me this question over the last 4-5 years i would probably give you a different answer every time. Thats because initially when i started off i was playing with any free method i could naturally because i had no capital.

Then i worked out how easy adwords could be and especially after reading Google Cash i started submitting ads and getting responses within minutes.

Both have pros and cons of course. With adwords your ad and link can be on the world wide web within minutes and you can have traffic funneling in, the con is that it costs money and if you dont know what your doing it can cost you even more money with no return *Hint*Try to have a few different campaigns and different ads going at the same time until you find the ones that convert best then drill down into those keywords and titles, also for high competition keywords set your bid high 3-5 bucks then drop it down slowly when you start to see results *End of Hint*

SEO can be totally free, it can also be outsourced for a price, but say you go the natural seo route, relevancy, keywords, backlinks all the things Google wants. Well if your a noob you might be wasting your time, cos if you have not taken the time to do your initial research it may be a waste of everything you have done, as you will never hit that first page, trust me, its happened to me plenty of times.

I had a free dog food recipe site that i worked on night and day and only after did i realize that the competing sites had thousands of backlinks which with my resources seemed impossible to beat.

My conclusion to this question at the moment would be this:

Before deciding on a method, do your research first, obviously low competition would mean you would have to be stupid to pay for the traffic and of course if its a high competition area adwords might be the go.

Its a little more complicated then that of course, and even when your site is uploaded and you begin toying with either method dont let that idea calcify in your brain like it did with me, be fluidic in your method. If PPC isnt working, then work your ass of and get some SEO goin and vice versa.

But the question still remains:

Paid of Free, and why?