Discussions about traffic inevitably lead to the debate about which is better: paid PPC (pay per click) advertising vs. free traffic from content marketing with articles. Here’s our comparison of these two traffic methods…

Cost to Start - No traffic generation method is truly “free” if you factor in your time. But PPC requires both time and a good-sized starting budget (least $300). Article marketing can also be time-intensive, especially if you’re not a natural at writing. But if your budget is tight, writing articles costs you nothing except time.

Yes, you can spend money outsourcing your articles to freelancers. And you can also invest in paid article submission services. But if you don’t have a few hundred extra dollars lying around, teaching yourself to quickly write articles is a great way to get traffic without spending any cash.

Speed of Traffic – PPC has an edge over article marketing, since your paid ads will go live almost instantly. When you submit an article to a syndication service, it can take several days before your article is approved and goes live. And it can take another day or two before your article gets indexed in Google, syndicated by webmasters, or read by visitors.

But if you learn the tricks to writing articles that almost demand to be read, you may be surprised at how quickly the traffic starts trickling in. You’ll also start to get traffic quickly if you submit to high-traffic article directories that also have an avid readership, like EzineArticles.com.

Time Involved – Writing and submitting articles does take time… but so does setting up PPC campaigns. Both PPC and article marketing require you to research niches and keywords, build websites, and test (yes, it’s important to track the traffic and sales your articles generate).

But it can take just as much time to write a good PPC ad – and to set up your campaigns – as it takes to write a couple of good articles. This is where outsourcing can help an article marketer. It’s usually much easier – and cheaper – to find a freelancer who can write good articles than to find someone who can set up PPC campaigns and write ads.

Quality of Traffic – Here’s where both PPC and article marketing run neck and neck. Provided you do your research and writing correctly, you’ll get highly targeted traffic from either method.

With PPC, it’s all about setting up your campaigns correctly and writing ads that pre-qualify, since you don’t want to pay for clicks from “tire kickers.” With article marketing, it’s all about researching your niche, understanding your audience, writing good titles, and creating a “clickable” resource box.

Risk vs. Reward – With PPC, you’re paying for every click, so there’s always the risk of spending your budget without making any sales. But clicks on your article resource boxes are essentially free, giving article marketing a much lower risk factor.

Longevity - Articles essentially stay online forever, unless the sites they’re on go down or they’re removed from the web for some other reason. PPC ads, of course, are only live as long as you pay for them.