During your conversations and emails with editors of traditional publications, there are most likely very few words that you don’t understand. When you first started freelancing, you may have had to look up what evergreen or proofs meant, but once you got a few stories under your belt, you could probably speak the lingo with the best of them.

As a content marketing writer, you will most likely find yourself Googling more than a few new terms. One of the reasons is that you will often be working with marketing people, who speak a whole new language (trust me, I am married to one of “them”). The other is that your clients will count on you to advise them on effective content marketing strategy as well as write the content so you need to be able to educate your clients. This involves knowing the lingo and what the terms actually mean. So, to help you quickly get up to speed and be able to talk the talk with the best of them, I am going to start covering Content Marketing Lingo in the blog.

This week we are going to talk about three words you will most likely hear very early on as you venture into Content Marketing Writing – paid media, owned media and earned media.

• Paid Media – When a company buys an ad in a traditional consumer publication.
• Owned Media – When a company creates a blog on their website educating their customers about how to use the product and any trends in the industry. The company owns the content and the messaging.
• Earned Media – When a publication writes a case study about the company or when the companies owned content is shared through social media by third-parties.

But what do these terms actually mean to you? You most likely will have nothing to do with paid media as a content marketing writer. And you probably knew right off the bat that your primary responsibility would be creating the owned media. However, the earned media is what you need to especially pay attention to.

One of your jobs will be to create enough of a buzz with your owned media – either by presenting new ideas or providing such useful content that other sources are interested in your content. When this happens, the owned content will be retweeted, liked on Facebook, discussed in blogs, and hopefully be written up as a case study. Earned media can be tricky because the company doesn’t control the messaging, but when it is positive it can be the most effective type of media.

By understanding these terms and applying them to brands, you can increase your revenue by gaining new clients. On Wednesday, I am going to talk about how to use your understanding of the three types of media to land a content marketing writing gig.

What has your experience been with the paid media, earned media and owned media? Any good examples that you have run across?