One of the most common questions that I encounter in online marketing is the “which is better” scenario.

Which is better, article marketing or video marketing? Is Forum marketing better than article marketing? Is blog commenting better than forum commenting?

We can apply this same line of questioning not only to traffic generation, but also list building techniques, keyword research, yadda yadda…

So back to Article marketing vs. Video marketing. Which IS better? Okay, here’s my short off the cuff answer… I dunno, test it and find out.

On the surface that doesn’t sound very helpful does it! Well if you think about it for a minute, you’ll realize that this is exactly what you should do. Don’t worry about whether it works for Joe marketer on the warrior forum.

Find out if it works for you. What works wonders for Joe may not be the best for you. It depends on your market, what you’re trying to accomplish, and even how you have your procedures set up. You do have procedures… right?

Also, I think that it’s a big mistake to be limiting yourself to only the “best” way to do something. Test all of the above and see what works for you. I’m willing to bet that they all do.

One of the techniques may work better than the others, but that doesn’t mean that you should ignore the others! Incorporate everything that drives traffic to your website or squeeze page.

Why would you want to limit yourself to only the best performing one? If you had 15 streams of income, would you dump them all and only keep the best income source? Heck no! A little bit of income from many sources really adds up.

The same is true with traffic generation. Joe Smoe might get tons of targeted traffic from article marketing, because he’s a great writer and passionate about it. You on the other hand, may be a great communicator and draw tons of traffic from video marketing, whereas Joe sucks at it.

Starting to see the picture? Traffic generation isn’t just a “apply one principle” technique. A little traffic from stumbleupon, a little from article marketing, a little from youtube, viddler, from forums, blogs, twitter, SERPS, etc, etc… it all adds up to a lot of traffic.

For free traffic generation (and pretty much everything), focus on the techniques that you are best at which give results. Outsource the tedious stuff so you don’t have to mess with it.

Do I hear mechanical turks?

As a business owner, your time is too valuable to be spending on tedious stuff or stressing over which is better because you’re obviously not testing. You’re the idea person… the creator, the captain.

Sam Walton didn’t build an empire by running around all day unloading trucks, stocking shelves, helping customers, and running the cash register. Why should you?

It’s a big world out there full of opportunities to achieve your goals. Test everything, scale up what works and toss or tweak what doesn’t.

In either case, tweak, tweak, tweak. Always try and improve what you have. The results will reverberate all through your marketing funnel. A little improvement goes a longgggg way. 🙂