To maximize traffic to your site, you need to use a combination of paid, earned and owned media. And because your traffic is likely to come from a combination of paid, earned and owned media, you need to be able to distinguish what’s coming from where. Paid traffic for example, is often the fastest way to attract traffic to a site and reach a large audience immediately, but it doesn’t guarantee customer loyalty. Paid traffic is paid advertising space, such as on search engine pages, websites and social channels, just like you pay to buy ad space in print publications. We’ll look at each channel and explain what they look like so you can better determine which channels are most promising for attracting traffic to your site and, ultimately, for growing your email list. For many companies, the more effort they put into developing content marketing, the more traffic they can attract. Earned media can be driven by paid and owned media, where someone sees paid or organic advertising and then shares information about your business through digital word of mouth. Because these forms of advertising seem less manipulative and focus on providing quality, credible third-party information, they are often a desirable way to attract traffic to a site. While there are no guarantees as to how much traffic each of these types of media can generate for you, the potential is enormous in terms of what you can achieve. Earned traffic is hard to generate, but it builds credibility and authority over time. Earned traffic comes from web content generated by outside sources.