Blog Marketing Provides Alternative To SEO and PPC

I read an interesting article on Site Pro News which debated the relative merits of paid search advertising in contrast with SEO. To paraphrase the article, SEO was desirable for some of the following reasons:

*People click on natural search results at a higher rate than paid advertisements. The percentages vary tremendously depending on the search engine and the industry, but most marketers will agree that natural search results get two to three times more clicks than paid listings.

*People trust information found in natural search results more than paid listings, and will convert into buying customers at a higher rate.

*Paid search costs continue to rise.

*Paid search is not a long term marketing solution. As soon as you stop paying Yahoo or Google, your traffic goes away.

Paid Search was desirable for some of the following reasons:

*You can control your campaign a lot easier. If you need additional business, you bid higher. If not, you turn the bids down.
*Yahoo and Google don’t ask for annual contracts.

The pay per click model did present a few advantages, but the winner in this particular debate was natural search.  The question is, how do you get there? How do you impress search engines to the point that they will list your web site on that all important first page? And more importantly, how do you fit natural search optimization into your budget? Most SEO firms are prohibitively expensive, and a pretty high percentage of them do not deliver.
The solution is to run a blog marketing campaign. Having an effectively optimized blog and writing articles will get better results quicker and for less cost than hiring an SEO company. It will also bring in better quality traffic and be a better long term solution than paid search.