PPC Advertising and Article Marketing - Compare and Contrast

I have used both PPC advertising (Google Adsense, Yahoo Overture, and some smaller ones) and I have submitted massive numbers of articles to easily over 100 article directories.

So I have a little first hand knowledge of what happens when I use either.

I will go with the pros and cons of each:

PPC:

Pros: One thing that is really nice about PPC is that you can dial up your efforts very quickly. With the right budget, and a broad enough keyword selection, you can easily get a few hundred hits per day, which is nice for testing new squeeze pages, and opt in scripts.

So two things happen here, you are testing your squeeze pages quickly and easily, and you are adding subscribers.

Cons: One thing I do not like about PPC is that my long term open rates are about 1/5 of the long term open rates of article-generated subscribers. So long run, I am not getting much bang for my buck.

Article Marketing:

Pros: The visitors I get from articles are very highly targeted, as long as my squeeze page corresponds with the content in the article. I now offer 4 different email lists to which visitors can opt in, and each has a different focus. This creates an almost hungry subscriber - they are hungry for more information from me, which translates into very high sales per subscriber.

Cons: Articles are time consuming to write and time consuming to submit. Sure, you can have someone ghost write your articles, but I really believe that a real connection occurs when you write the article yourself. Then they get to your squeeze page and the squeeze page has the same feel as the article, if you wrote it yourself. I think this connection is one of the reasons my conversion rate on my subscribers to customers is so high.

Conclusion: I am using PPC sparingly and writing much more. Perhaps your time is more limited than mine, so your mix will be a little heavier on the PPC side. But I think that long term testing of both is critical. Then you can make an educated decision about the best mix for you and you campaigns.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? Download my free report: Secrets of Article Promotion

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Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has created over 270 articles in print and 7 published ebooks online.