Since economic resources are scarce and not limitless, one has to make choices according to one’s scale of preference in order to allocate scarce economic resources amongst competing alternative uses.This is the genesis of the comparison between Article Marketing and Guest Blog Posting.

From basic economics, opportunity cost is the real cost of anything in the sense of the alternative forgone.

In the light of the above, since resources, in this case time and money to be spent is not limitless and has so many competing uses, the internet marketer has to schedule these resources between Guest Blog Posting and Article Marketing amongst all other internet marketing strategies.

The comparison becomes more relevant since both aim to achieve almost the same objectives of building backlinks and generating traffic and so are effectively substitutes.

The question often arises as to which of these two strategies is a better option.

My answer to this question is very simple. Start by identifying which objectives each of these options aim to achieve and identify which of the two achieves these objectives better.

Guest Blog Posting usually require very original but shorter articles.

Secondly, the guest blogger quite often gets one or may be two links for each article he gets published on the host website. In most cases, guest posts reside majorly on the hosting website and are not usually syndicated widely.

Some guest blog posting is done free but ironically? some sites require you to pay before you can guest post.

I say ironically, because as you will see in my analysis and final conclusion to this article, I would even consider greatly whether it is worth my while to guest post not to talk of being asked to come and make payment to do this.

They call them by different names to cover up the true intent of such schemes e.g. link building mechanisms.

Such schemes only end up being of greater benefit to the hosting website since content is being supplied to them and being paid for at the same time.

Now to a comparison with Article Marketing

In Article Marketing, the major snag is that you have to write a longer article of about a minimum of 400 words.

Ordinarily, the article should be original. Note that I use the words "ordinarily should be original" contrary to when i was referring to Guest Posting when I used the words "very original."

This is because article spinners and article leverage tools are now the "in-thing" in article syndication such that it is questionable to refer to such articles as "very original."

However, once written and syndicated, each article can be distributed to the entire network of article directories of an article syndication service or an article submitting software and with each article entitled to have about two backlinks each pointing to the author’s website, then you can multiply out the number of backlinks each article will produce in comparison to the just one or two, of the Guest posting.

These backlinks and accompanying traffic generated through article marketing now even goes viral when the articles begin to be republished from the original article directories the article syndication service or article submitting software syndicates the articles to.

Do you now see why I made the earlier statement that I will even think greatly before accepting to guest post for free not to talk of being asked to make payment to guest post.

To me, except the hosting website is a very high traffic website and/or high authority website (with very high PR), I do not think it is worth the while, depleting scarce resources of time and sometimes money on such strategies (Guest Blog Posting) given their opportunity cost in terms of the alternative foregone (article marketing) since one will definitely impact the other in terms of the volume you are able to churn out.