In most cases, successful webmasters employ a wide variety of tactics to get their message out and increase traffic. Those who solely rely upon basic SEO will be sorely disappointed when they discover that their goals are not met and their analytics are displaying some paltry results. A balance of tactics is vital in maintaining success and growing your brand, but most do not have the time or resources to engage in every single aspect of content creation, branding, SEO and marketing. Sometimes, we’ll have to weigh out various elements to determine which ones are most worth our time. When it comes to link building and content marketing, both can be invaluable tools that help drive traffic our way, but which one is right for you if there’s only time to adequately engage in one? We’ll discuss some advantages to each and help you make the best decision.

What They Both Accomplish

Whether you are link building or marketing content, you can expect a few benefits from each when they are done properly. For starters, they both will help drive traffic to your website or blog. You’ll also notice an increase in conversions with the use of either tactic. When pinging links to search engines through both measures, you’ll also experience a boost in online visibility and name recognition, which allows you to build out a brand even more so. Last but not least, harvesting new relationships across the web becomes much more possible and frequent when using either of these methods.

How Link Building Benefits You

Obviously link building has been a vital tactic of many webmasters and content creators for a long time. Before social media became a stomping ground for viral content and marketing, users were sharing their content and links with others via blogs, and requesting trade-offs in the form of backlinks to improve search engine rankings. Today, however, link building’s main benefit is putting content in front of others who might not find it otherwise. When a blog mentions one of your posts and links to it, for instance, you can be sure that some of their readers will find their way to your website. Link building can help accentuate a content marketing strategy, but it can also be a good way to build long-term potential.

How Content Marketing Benefits You

Content marketing is a newer phenomenon – at least the word itself – and revolves around boosting content exposure through mediums such as social media. Pinging links across Facebook feeds and groups can be one free way to engage in content marketing, while paid advertising on Google and social media is another option. Content marketing can boost short-term exposure with various audiences, depending on how you approach it. This is much easier than link building when it comes to the amount of time you must invest and spend waiting for results to occur.

Conclusion

Ultimately, you need to engage in several different promotional strategies in order to yield results, but content marketing appears to be the better bet for newer brands that want to boost traffic, conversions and sales in the short-term. If you are OK with waiting for results that are more passive in nature once achieved, then link building may prove to be the better focus.