Blog Marketing vs. Article Marketing

What is your experience?

Which one is better for:

1. Targeted traffic
2. Better conversions
3. Long term effects on sales

If you have product that is not "blogable" a lot, which route will you choose?

Thank you in advance for your time and efforts to share your experience.

I found latest Joel Spolsky post over Inc magazine so inspiring.
I'm trying to startup as software vendor and the first application I'm going to release is a tag cloud generator.

I found that blogging about how to make the product is even better than talking as pure sales man describing a brochure.

So I think that in my case, blog marketing is the way and... you can easily find a way to blog on about how are you making the stuff you're proposing to the world.

I think that you can have great results at least for point 1 and 3. About conversion rate I don't have so much experience.

It is all relative. But I will take a stab:

Targeted traffic sounds the most appealing. If you have the traffic, then you can A/B test and analyze different metrics to optimize your conversions.

Better Conversions is great, but it depends on what the number they are "better than"

Long term effects on Sales it is difficult to understand exactly what you mean by this?

Either way, your product need not be "blogable" for you to blog. Try to determine what industry will likely use your product and blog about topics that are relevant to that industry.

The two methods are really not analogous. Here are some comparison points:

• Both blog posts and articles have a relatively long search engine shelf life. However human readers will notice how current the information itself is.
• Blog posts lend themselves to time sensitive information, and articles to more permanent information.
• Articles tend to be longer that blog posts and so have opportunity for more depth.
• When someone finds a blog post, they find the whole blog so the possibility to find other posts of interest exists.
• Articles may be found in a vacuum (there are not guaranteed to be, they just can be), so they have to stand on their own.
• Articles can be posted in many places giving them more opportunity to be found, blog posts are generally posted in just one place.
• Articles are more outbound marketing while blog posts are more inbound marketing.

So to answer your question directly, I would say:

1. Targeted traffic: article marketing wins hands down
2. Better conversions: no clear winner, needs to be tested as noted elsewhere
3. Long term effects on sales: both have strong possibilities to have a big impact