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Content marketing is by no means new, but it can be a hard game to get into -- not because it's hard to market with content, but because sometimes it seems as though content marketers are speaking their own language. I'd like to clear up some of the more obscure content marketing jargon for you. I'll assume that you know generic Internet Marketing jargon like 'Above the Fold' and all the three-letter acronyms (SEO, PPC, ETC.); if don't have a good grasp of those, this probably won't make any sense regardless.

A

Accessibility: The quality of being able to be reached, comprehended, and put into use -- in content marketing, most often applied to an individual piece of content.
Agility: The ability of a company to alter its content marketing strategy quickly in response to new events or new understanding of their market.
Authenticity: The ability of a company to communicate authentically with its customers, authenticity is one of the strong points of content marketing and separates it from traditional marketing.
Authority: A quality of content that makes the audience inclined to trust it. Authoritative content is, by and large, something to you should attempt to create.
Aggregation: The process of acquiring content from a variety of different sources and providing it in a single outlet. SEE: Scraping.
Astroturfing: The act of using fake comments created by your business in order to promote a product or idea. Highly controversial and illegal in some countries.
Atomization: The process of breaking a long and/or technical piece of content down into several smaller or easier-to-comprehend units and publishing them individually. Often used to take an in-depth article or white paper and post it, atomized, onto Twitter or Facebook.

B

Branded Content: Content that appears to belong within its larger context, but features a brand as a key part of the content. For example, watching a movie and seeing obvious Apple logos on the equipment people are using in that movie (i.e. 'product placement') is branded content. So is a guest blog post that mentions the website of the guest blogger and says positive things about the guest blogger's product or service. SEE: Native Advertising.
Buyer Persona: One of a few different fictional examples of your target audience, the Buyer Persona is made to help you guide the kind of content you create.

C

Click Bait: 1) A piece of content created specifically for the purpose of getting other websites to link to it, either because it's incredibly authoritative or because it's controversial and outrageous. 2) A link that is highlighted or otherwise emphasized in such a way as to obviously encourage the surfer to click on it.
Content Curation: The process of culling content from a number of other sources, adding your own often-minor commentary to that content, and then sharing it with your target audience.
Content Filtering: The process of sorting content from a number of other sources based on the keywords, publication dates, or other properties in order to determine which content is the most appropriate for your audience, generally considered one step of the content curation process (see above).
Closed-Loop Analytics: The process of continuously refining a process (in Content Marketing, usually the content creation process) by using analytics tools to determine how the audience is reacting, and doing more of the things they reply positively to. That effort produces more analytics, which are used to further refine, and so on, creating a closed loop.
Content Marketing: The process of creating or curating and then distributing content with the purpose of engaging your potential customer base.
Content Mill: A website that produces a large quantity of low-quality content. Almost extinct after Google's Panda and Penguin updates discouraged the practice.
Creative Commons: The most common form of Open Source license, a Creative Commons (or 'CC') license on a piece of content means that anyone can use that content for any reason without legal complications simply by correctly attributing the content to its source. The Creative Commons Searchis an incredibly useful tool for content creators. SEE: Open License.
Crowdsourcing: A method of creating content by allowing the people on your various social media sites create content for one another, rather than having your company create it. Forums, 'answers' sites, and simply asking your Facebook and Twitter followers for their best tips are all great ways to get free and decent content.

D

Data-Backed Content: Any content you create that's based on hard data such as scientific studies or poll data. Backing up your content with hard data creates instant authority.
Dynamic Content: Any content you create that displays differently based on the information you already have about the viewer. For example, if you've already collected the viewer's ZIP code via a squeeze page, you might have a page that scrapes local news to put up on the sidebar of your main content.

E

Earned Media: Also called 'free media' (somewhat counter-intuitively.) Earned Media consists of any medium that links to or posts your content with attribution because your content is just that darn good. SEE: Owned Media
Evergreen: Evergreen content is content that will continue to be appealing to your audience for the foreseeable future. Its popularity is not based on current events, seasonality, trends, or any other time-limited factor.

F

Freshness: Of a piece of content, the quality of being new (and unique.) Fresh content is treated differently by Google in that social media response to a content is weighed much more strongly while that content is fresh (i.e. in the first 2 weeks or so after the content has been indexed.)

I

Influencer: An influencer is any individual that has a large number of contacts within your target market and a notable amount of sway over those contacts. Getting influencers' support is an enormous benefit to your business; turning an influencer against you is even more negative than their support is beneficial.
Influence Marketing: The process of contacting and leveraging influencers (see above) within a given market to support you in your marketing efforts. The influencer may be formally hired, they may be the target of a relationship-building effort (see below), or may simply asked to share content with their followers.
Infographic: A kind of content known for its popularity on the social media, infographics use visuals to represent data, usually interesting statistics, in a memorable way.
Information Architecture: The navigational, linking, and other elements that allow a surfer or a search engine spider to find your content.
Integrated Marketing: A marketing philosophy that aims to create very similar content across all channels in order to present a very coherent brand to all consumers.

K

Kaizen: Japanese term meaning "to commit to continuous improvement." Often applied to the process of Closed-Loop Analytics.
KPI (Key Performance Indicators): a.k.a. Key Performance Metrics, these are the numbers agreed-upon by the marketing team at the beginning of any marketing campaign that will be used to determine whether or not a campaign is successful enough to continue investing in.

L

Localization: The act of making a particular piece of content appropriate for use in a different location. Localization goes beyond mere translation to take cultural and idiomatic differences into account.
Lifecycle Marketing: A marketing philosophy used often in Content Marketing that views each individual customer as having a 'lifecycle' that proceeds from "Person who has never heard of us" through the phases of "awareness," "evaluation," "purchase," "followup," and ultimately "fandom."

M

Mashup: A type of content that takes two known archetypes, worlds, themes, characters, or other established elements of two different canons and puts them together to create either incongruity or to establish a unique, third canon. Mashups are tricky to pull off for both legal and creative reasons, but tend to be highly successful when pulled off. SEE: Remix Culture.
Meme: On the Internet, a 'meme' is an established saying, phrase, or element of culture that has become common enough that it's possible to do it 'wrong.' For example, the lolcatz meme involves a generally-cute picture of a cat that is captioned with words in a very specific pidgin English. If you produce a cat picture with the caption in a different kind of pidgin English, you risk 'doing it wrong' and provoking the scorn of the Internet. Memes are very important and strongly defended by their communities. Successfully creating a new meme is a hallmark of content marketing success (for example, the Dos Equis "World's Most Interesting Man" or the Old Spice "Guy On a Horse".)
Mentions: Instances of people talking about your business, product, or service on some form of social media. Most often used in the context of an amount, as in 'we need more mentions' or 'we got enough mentions that we should get a solid Google bump for a week or two.'

N

Native Advertising: A form of advertising that is carefully designed to look 'native,' i.e. like it belongs in the larger context of its medium. For example, an ad designed to look like a one-page article in an industry magazine, or a 'news story' paid for by a business but delivered by a newscaster during a news broadcast. SEE: Branded Content.
Newsjacking: The act of taking a news story that is breaking, adding or subtracting elements to make it relevant to your brand, and posting it to your owned media (see below) in order to use it as marketing content. SEE: Tentpole Content.

O

Open Source: Of a piece of content, Open Source content is content that is licensed for reuse for any purpose. Open Source content is often used by businesses because it's easy to find and there are no legal complications for its use. SEE: Creative Commons
Opt-In: A technique in which a piece of content is used as 'bait' to get permission from a consumer to contact them in the future with marketing-related mentioned. Most often used to get people's email addresses for the purpose of sending them marketing emails.
Owned Media: Any medium that you own, including your business' Facebook page, Twitter channel, blog, website, YouTube channel, and anywhere else that you can put up content where you and you alone control which content goes up there. SEE: Earned Media

P

Personalization: The process of offering content that is uniquely created with a particular Buying Persona, and often a particular phase of Lifecycle Marketing, in mind. Personalization is often achieved using Dynamic Content.
Promotion: The effort put forth to get your content in front of its audience. In general, the accepted wisdom is that you should put as much time and energy into promoting any given piece of content that you put into creating it.

Q

Quality: As specifically relates to content, 'quality' is commonly accepted to be comprised of four elements: originality, authority, depth, and consistency. If you consistently turn out original content that 'goes deep' on a subject and carries an air of authority, you will become known as a source of quality content.

R

Remix Culture: The attribute of modern Internet surfers that has them enjoying content that is taken from one context and put into another context with changes to make it appropriate to its new context. The success of groups like Postmodern Jukebox and 'Weird' Al Yankovic are hallmarks of the Remix Culture, and content creators are well advised to take the Remix Culture to heart when considering new content.
Repurposing: The act of taking an existing piece of content and making small changes to it that make it useful for a different purpose or on a different platform. Repurposing is an excellent use of time and energy if you have a lot of content created. Sometimes called 'sweating your content'.

S

Scraping: Using a program or other automated tool to find relevant content and posting a part of it, a link to it, or sometimes the entire thing to a medium you control. SEE: Aggregation.
Seasonal Content: Content that is only relevant during a particular but recurring timeframe. The most common kind of seasonal content is Christmas-oriented content, but seasonal content exists for almost every time of year. SEE: Evergreen Content
Seeding: The act of distributing a piece of content to a limited audience with the intent of creating anticipation or 'buzz' around a future, broader-scale release of content.
Social Optimization: The act of making your content as easy to share on the social networks as possible. Often includes putting Like/Pin/Tweet buttons on your content, sometimes even with pre-set messages so that the surfer simply needs to click twice to share the content.
Social Proof: The technique of putting testimonials, expert opinions, or other authoritative statements in your content in order to increase the authority of that content.
Strategy: In content marketing, your company's Strategy is the plan they put in place that explains why they are creating content and how they're going to determine whether their efforts are successful.

T

Tentpole Content: Content that is timed with the occurrence of real-world events in order to increase shares and elicit a greater response. Akin to Newsjacking, but generally not news -- for example, posting soccer-related content during the World Cup. SEE: Newsjacking.
Thought Leadership: The process of demonstrating a person or company's expertise in a specific area of endeavor by creating and distributing content that shows a unique, radical, or unorthodox way of thinking about that industry or activity.
Troll: An Internet user who exists for the sole purpose of saying negative things in the most outrageous, shocking, and reaction-provoking way. At some point, you will encounter a troll, and the only correct way to respond to a troll is to ignore it. If you reply in any way to a troll, you are only going to cause it to redouble its efforts. Trolls can appear very damaging to a social media campaign, but the truth is that most people on the Internet these days recognize a troll when they see one. The only time you should respond to a troll is if they seem to be getting support from the rest of the crowd -- and even then, you should respond to the sentiment in general, never to the troll in specific.

U

Unique Selling Proposition (USP): The thing that makes your offer better than your competitors' offers. At some point in your selling process, you must find a way to inform your prospect of your USP in a way that 'sticks' in their mind, or they'll have no particular reason to buy from you instead of your competition. A significant part of content marketing is spent calling attention to your USP.

V

Veblin Goods: Any product that is priced irrationally high specifically to attract the impression of being 'elite' or 'special.' Marketing Veblin goods is a very different process than marketing standard goods because the audience is quite narrow.
Virality: Of a piece of content, the quality of being rapidly and widely shared. Achieving a viral level of sharing is one of the major goals of almost all content marketing.
Visual Content: Highly prized by surfers, visual content generally gets more shares and attention than text-only content. Can be an infographic, a video, a slideshow, or any other medium that relies on graphics more than words to make a point.

W

White Paper: A kind of content that provides technical details of a particular, usually proprietary, process of piece of technology. Because they're highly technical, white papers aren't common in content marketing, but can be used if the target audience consists of experts in the relevant field.
Word of Mouse: A pun on 'word of mouth' -- used to refer to content that is shared via clickable methods such as social sharing buttons.
Whew! That was quite a journey. If, after all that, you still have questions about content marketing, feel free to contact me directly through my website.