subject: Article Marketing vs. Social Media [print this page] Article Marketing vsArticle Marketing vs. Social Media
It may seem as though article marketing takes a lot of time when compared to social media or social bookmarking sites. But the truth is that if you are a writer, and you can pump out several articles per hour, then article marketing to get free traffic does not have to take longer than social media, and the results can be just as great.
Social Media
Social media basically gives you back what you put in. This means that if you use social media sites just to throw up your links and hope for the best, then you will not get much traffic from that site.
With social media, you need to have a lot of friends to help your content stay on top, otherwise it gets buried and no one will ever see it again. Therefore you need to take the time to build relationships with other users by reading and rating their content so that they will do the same for you. Depending on how much time you have to hang around social media sites, this could take you a while.
However, once you have your connections, then social media will be a blessing to you, as an hour spent on social media sites will generate immediate traffic. But, it may not pay off as well in the long run, as your links may get buried.
Article Marketing
But with article marketing, you write the articles and them submit them to article directories and your work is done. Once and for all.
There is no need to spend any time rating or commenting on other people's articles in order to get views, as the article directories will usually feature your article on the front page of the directory. On top of that they will also market your articles so that they will continue to climb in the search engines and thus generate traffic for you on a long term basis.
So basically for every hour that you spend using social media you can write and submit at least 2 articles which will give you at least 4 or more back links, depending on how many directories you submit your article to.
However, don't get me wrong, social media sites are great, and you should take advantage of them, but article marketing is just as successful in the long run, and doesn't take anymore work, provided you are efficient when it comes to writing and typing. The key is to take advantage of both for a maximum amount of free traffic.
