What Are the Four Types of Online Content?

When building your online presence, it is important to think about the content you will post online. Content is the currency of the web, and every business must become a content producer to gain the results the information age provides. There are four types of content that we help businesses with at Wellspring: owned, rented, paid, and earned. These broad categories help us keep in context how the content should be created to be effective.

Owned

Owned content is content that you control. This means that you own everything about it from the narrative that you tell to the platform that content is distributed on. This is ultimately where we want users to end up.

An example of owned content would be your website and the connected blog. We recommend that every business have a blog set up for their business. This helps keep your website updated and relevant for your given industry.

All the other types of content should point to the owned content because there you control the flow. You can guide your users to where you want them to go, hopefully to inspire them to take action and engage with you and your business.

Rented

Rented content refers to the platform on which you post content. The place you see this now is social media. Here you have control over the flow users take to an extent. This is not the place to sell, per se, but rather build awareness. 

Share moments in your business or tips that can help the user for free. The idea here is that you would have small impressions on your potential customers so that when they are ready to buy, they think of your business.

Paid

Paid content refers to ads that you purchase on online platforms. This would include Meta or LinkedIn ads. Ads can help grow your business more quickly because there is a speed to the number of impressions that you get. The ad platform puts your creative in front of your defined audience.

Rented and Paid go hand in hand. One of our favorite strategies is to create a rented piece of content, and if it does well, we can then boost that post or a version as a paid ad. You already know that the content resonates. Now we just get that content in front of as many people as we can.

Earned

Earned content is the holy grail, but you should expect to focus on the others. Earned content is where someone else creates content that mentions you. You now have all the impressions without having to create the content.

You will most likely see this with blog posts. Your blog post could be used as a reference in another blog’s content. You get the benefit of their SEO efforts without having to put in the energy. 

Conclusion

Now that you know the broad types of content, you can tailor your creative to the specific type. I recommend focusing on the owned, rented, and paid content, as those are predictable, unlike the earned content. If you need help with your content strategy, we would love to have a conversation on how you can boost any of these content types. Click here to contact us. We would love to talk with you about your situation.