I'd rather build traffic around content because it will be a hell of a lot easier. If you have good content, which you should. Then you can double your traffic because people will revisit, there is also the word of mouth factor etc. People want to link to articles and content, they don't want to link to a bunch of crap and pour a whole lot of untargeted traffic which won't do much except waste bandwidth and possibly cost you (if you pay for traffic).
I'm amazed by how my site than only gets a few hundred daily impressions is being linked to on forums, blogs and websites all over the place, this was spurred by a few digg and beta.netscape.com submissions and loyal visitors.