The difference between the two is immense. SEO is essentially implementing all the means in your website to make it easy to get indexed by the search engines. It has to have enough keywords. Your meta tags have to be set right. Then on top of that, your website has to have good content and be easy for the customer to make use of. It's ways to make your site visible on the search engine without you having to spend money on advertising.

It's a wise technique, but it should not be your main strategy because that's a lot of work just to save money on advertising.

When starting off, most gurus recommend PPC ads just so you start driving traffic to your websites and making money. A lot of newbies are afraid to do this because they are worried about their advertising costs skyrocketing; however, you can always try cheaper PPC engines like 7search.

Start with those first so that you can test your ads. If you're getting clicks but no sales, then pause the campaign. The problem is in your website copy, not the PPC ad. You're obviously getting traffic coming through.

When you're getting more traffic and making a sales, you can ramp up PPC efforts. You should still consider writing articles at goarticles.com or ezine.com. They certainly help with the costs.

Another way to do paid advertising at a flat rate is exactseek.com. They are partnered with goarticles.com and several other search engines. You create an add similar to a PPC ad, but only pay $12 a listing per 3 months or $36 a listing per year. You pay with PayPal or 2 Checkout.

If you think about it, $36 a year to be a the top of the advertizing list in all these directories is a little bit cheaper than regular pay per click advertising.

Start out small with your costs then build up.