All new travel content creators embark on a unique journey that goes far beyond just visiting foreign lands. From putting on the finance manager hat to figuring out SEO, this globe-trotting group of experienced sharers needs to master a great many skills on their path to success. A good place to start is getting to grips with some of the terminology that you might run into along the way. There are plenty of buzzwords floating around from different industry-specific groups that all have some bearing on travel content creators. From freelancing to digital marketing, and a bunch of things in between, there is a kind of cross-pollination of terms that are worth knowing.
So, for all you aspiring influences who have chosen travel as your niche, here are some of the most common “must-know” terms that you might run into on your journey.
Must Know Travel Words – Sections
To make this as easy to follow as possible, we will be breaking things up into sections. Each section will touch on a few useful terms to know from that specific industry.
Travel Content Creation:
If you are into content creation then there is no need to lecture you on the topic, but these 4 terms are ones that are often either overlooked or misunderstood.
Content Calendar: A schedule for planning and publishing travel content. It is so important to know exactly what you want to upload and when. Having a schedule helps you to plan out what content you need to be ready and when.
Content Strategy: It’s a plan for creating and distributing travel content. If the content calendar tells you when you need to upload, the content strategy tells you what kind of content you should upload and where to publish it. The strategy does not tell you anything specific about what you might have to do but is rather a general plan pointing in the direction you want to go in.
Evergreen Content: This refers to travel content that remains relevant over time. It is something that is not always as easy for travel creators to incorporate into their content, as the subject matter is always in flux. Say for instance you provide information in a travel vlog about how cheap rice is in China; two weeks later the government imposes a new tax on rice farmers and the price skyrockets. Evergreen content is great for SEO, but not always doable.
Multimodal Content: It means that the project you are working on uses various media types, such as images, text, and video, in one piece of content. This has become common practice, and you would be hard-pressed to find a blog post without a cover image, embedded video, and so on.
Freelancing: Travel freelancing is a biggie. It is an ever-growing market with so many aspects that it would take an entry-level college course to get to grips with the full scope of the freelancing world. The following words are just a few of the most common ones that might show up on your travel journey.
Gig Economy: Working on a project-by-project basis. A lot of travel content creators do several other things to help keep meat in the pot, a lot of which is on a gig-to-gig basis.
Pitching: If you have ever sent proposals to travel publications, you have made a pitch. Whether you are trying to sell a feature article to a fancy travel blog or just building backlinks, pitching is an integral part of the freelancer journey.
Remote Work: Working as a travel content creator from anywhere in the world is one of the best perks of being in this line of work. Plenty of organizations have adopted remote work setups as a way for them to save money, as they don’t need to rent extensive office space with all the expenses that come with it.
B2F: B2f stands for “business to freelancer” and refers to the interactions between businesses and freelancers. As freelancing grows in popularity, many businesses have had to adapt to the changing markets and have started to adopt specific ways to interact with their non-full-time employees.
Niche Specialization: The term “niche” is a very common one in the online world, and it is of the utmost importance to find a niche specialization. This allows you to focus on a specific aspect of travel, like hiking trips in Asia or luxury vacation destinations, and to build your content around that particular part of the travel industry. It is always best to find a specialization that interests you and to try to hone in on a particular topic rather than trying to cover everything relating to travel.
Freelance Marketplace: These are platforms like Upwork or Freelancer that allow you to find travel gigs if you are keen on doing some side gigs. If you can make money simply from running your socials or blog, that’s great, but it is always good to have an extra bit of income, and freelance marketplaces are the best place to find some work.
Travel SEO (Search Engine Optimization):
SEO is the big bogeyman for many travel content creators. It is a very broad topic with complicated moving parts and continual updates to consider. Also, remember that search optimization can be used on every site with a search function, be it Bing or AirBnB. Here are a few keywords (no pun intended) to take note of with some definitions that have been simplified to help everyone get some idea of what they are:
Meta Tags: The straight-out definition would be something like, “HTML elements that provide information to search engines.” But that doesn’t tell us much. Meta tags are bits of content that provide a summary of your webpage. The most obvious place to spot them is when you do a web search. All the information displayed in the search results is taken from the website’s meta content. Meta content is usually only used to display in search engines or in the text that pops up when you share a link through socials.
Backlinks: In order for your site to improve its “domain authority” (explained below) you need links from other websites pointing to your content. The more sites are pointing to your content the better, but you need sites with a high domain authority to point to you in order for search engines to trust your stuff.
Domain Authority: This is a score out of 100 that shows how trustworthy your content is. The higher this domain authority score, the more likely it will be that you appear higher up in search results. This is done through a process called “link building” (explained below). Above is a definition for pitching, which is something that you will be employing in your link building mission.
Link Building: This is the process of acquiring high-quality links to your travel articles. As discussed above, you need sites that have a high domain authority to link to you. As an example, you should look for a travel blog with high domain authority, pitch a story idea to them, and include a backlink or two in the article pointing back to your content.
Keywords: Depending on the market you want to reach, you need to look at what people search for in that niche and make sure to include those words or phrases in your articles. This helps search engines understand what is on your page, allowing them to provide the most relevant content for your search. This kind of research is done using tools such as Google Keyword Planner or looking at the latest trends on sites like Exploding Topics.
You might also run into the term “long-tail keywords” which are the same as regular keywords but are more specific and less competitive search terms.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page): This is another very common term in SEO, and simply refers to the page where search engine results are displayed. Your mission is usually to be as high up on a SERP as possible. Getting up there in the results through SEO is called generating “organic traffic”.
Organic Traffic: These are visitors who find your travel content naturally through search without you having had to pay for ads. Because the first few results on search engines are usually just paid ads, through SEO you are trying to rank as close to those paid ads as possible without directly just paying to get there.
Local SEO: This one is very reliant if you are aiming at a certain location with your content. All that local SEO implies is that you are optimizing travel content for specific geographic areas. Say for instance that you want people in California to watch your TikToks about Bali because you take tours from Cali to Bali once a year and are using your content to advertise this; then local SEO is something you will really have to brush up on.
Travel Marketing:
Marketing yourself is uber important if you hope to be successful in the world of travel content creation. SEO might seem like marketing to some, but SEO is simply a method of making your content easier to find. The real marketing comes after.
Content Promotion: This relies on you sitting down and coming up with strategies to get your travel content in front of a larger audience. Content promotion can take many forms, but the outcome has to be that more people get to see what you are up to.
Social Media Advertising: This is a form of content promotion where you pay for ads on platforms like Facebook or YouTube to give your content a boost to the top of certain searches. This is something that many travel creators try to steer clear of as it can cost you a pretty penny. But, as business spending on social media advertising has gone through the roof in recent years, it should tell you that there is something to it.
Email Marketing: Sending marketing emails out. If you have a mailing list of subscribers then email marketing is simply sen sending travel-related content to those who have signed up for it. These emails are meant to push your subs to more of your content.
Affiliate Marketing: This is a way of making some money by promoting travel products and earning a commission if someone purchases said product or service using your link or code. You might be most familiar with YouTubers using some half-baked transition into “This video is sponsored by…” and ending it on “…click the link in the description for 20% off your first purchase,” or something along those lines. There are many companies willing to pay out handsomely as long as you can drive some traffic their way and those people sign up or buy something.
Conversion Rate: It is no good having someone open your site, scroll to the bottom of the main page, and then leave. You need a high percentage of users who take desired actions, like booking a guided tour or buying “I Love Africa” t-shirts from your Etsy store. If a lot of people are “window shopping” without making a purchase, then you might be doing something wrong in your marketing or price.
A/B Testing: Basically this means that you experiment with different versions of travel content to optimize results. There is no use producing content if no one is paying any attention to it. You need to do some testing to see exactly what people like best, and do more of that.
Lead Generation: This is a practice that has really taken shape over the last couple of years with companies willing to spend a lot of money on getting some real leads. Lead generation is just attracting potential travelers to your site for future conversions. This can be a tricky thing to do if you are a lone ranger in the wilderness of travel content creation, but having some serious potential clients ready to pay you for your product or service is almost as good as money in the bank.
Influencer Marketing: Whether you are an influencer or not, collaborating with travel influencers for promotion is a great way of pulling in some people from a specific niche who might be interested in what you are doing. The influencer market is on the up and up, meaning that there are plenty of opportunities for collaborations.
Analytics: Data analysis is key to making sure things are going in the right direction. In order to track the performance of your marketing efforts, you need to continually have your eye on the numbers. If you spent $1,000 on a new Facebook ad campaign and a week later you are not seeing any increase in your site traffic, then you need to know about it so that you can figure out what is going wrong and fix it ASAP.
AI for Travel (Artificial Intelligence):
Like it or not, AI is now a part of our world and will probably be taking over more and more of it as time goes by. This should be seen as an exciting thing, as it can help all of us in ways we have not even thought of yet. Still, it can be scary dealing with this new technology, but you better get used to it. Microsoft’s Bing was one of the first big names to start implementing AI into their search function, and now AI search is quickly becoming the standard for all search engines across the board. This means that changes to the way SEO, online marketing, travel, etc. are done will be on the table in the near future, so better be ready. Check out these terms to get a better idea of the lingo that has popped up around AI.
Chatbots: These are AI-powered tools for helping you with all kinds of things, almost like an assistant would. It allows you to interact with the AI in a similar way to how you would talk to a human. These chatbots have already taken over as the first point of contact for many companies’ help sections, as the go-to for getting more relevant answers when doing web searches, and it seems there is a lot more to come.
Natural Language Processing (NLP): This simply refers to AI’s ability to understand human language. In the past, you would have had to learn a specific way to communicate with machines, like learning a programming language or knowing all the Boolean web search operators, but now you can talk to the computer in plain English and get exactly the result you wish for.
Recommendation Engines: Recommendation engines are AI systems that are able to make suggestions as to travel destinations or activities. It takes a bunch of factors into account and helps people to make a good decision as to where they should go and what to do there.
Sentiment Analysis: This is AI that gauges public sentiment, which can be put to the task of figuring out how people feel about certain travel destinations. This might be a good tool to look for some underrated and cheap deals in places where others are not interested in going right now.
Predictive Analytics: This is still in its early days, but predictive analytics tries to do some forecasting, meaning it will be able to predict travel trends using AI algorithms. While not the most useful of things to know about right now, it will defensibly be making a big appearance in the coming years.
AI-Generated Content: It is now possible to use AI to assist you in writing travel articles or captions, generating images, etc. These are the so-called AI-generated content, but despite what the AI puts out there being amazing, not all of it will be helpful. The 2 main things that AI content is known for is inaccurate information. Yes, ChatGPT has been caught on numerous occasions making up “facts”. The second issue is that search engines are able to pick up if your content is generated by AI, which can have a negative impact on your overall SEO. So instead of relying on AI to write all your posts, instead use it as a tool to optimize your time.
Travel Specific:
Now it’s time to go through some travel-specific terminology that you are all too likely to run into on your travel content creation journey.
Cultural Immersion: While it is possible to travel without having much impactful contact with the locals from the area you are traveling in, cultural immersion encourages travelers to deeply engage with local culture. Not much point exploring a far-off destination if you don’t get to really experience what the people of that country value, what they eat, see how they live, etc. When you culturally immerse yourself, you get a much better picture of what local life is like.
Travel Hacking: While travel hacking has nothing to do with hacking, it does provide a way for people to help slash some of their travel costs. The term is used to describe the practice of utilizing reward points to supplement your travel budget. Some credit cards offer lucrative reward point systems that will allow you to gain points by using the card, and then allow you to redeem those points for free flights or flight upgrades, discounts in select stores, access to certain airport lounges, and a bunch of other nice perks.
Off-The-Beaten-Path: This refers to unconventional and less-touristy travel destinations. There is nothing worse than showing up somewhere and finding it overrun with tour buses, noisy children, and street vendors selling trinkets harassing you. Going off the beaten path means that you are being picky about what you want to see, by looking for interesting things or places where not a lot of other travelers go.
Ecotourism: This one seems to be one of the biggest buzzwords out there today, as more and more people try to travel in a sustainable and environmentally responsible way. Ecotourism focuses on traveling in a way that involves nature, enjoying and preserving it. This style of tourism tries to stick with experiences with the least impact on the environment while paying close attention to respecting all cultures and lifestyles.
Adventure Travel: When you head out looking for adrenaline-filled activities and journeys, you are an adventure traveler. Whether this entails diving with Great White sharks in South Africa or attempting to climb Everest, a lot of people enjoy getting their blood pumping while trotting the globe.
Voluntourism: Some people want to make a difference while traveling in foreign lands, others just like to travel the world while not paying too much for food and accommodation by spending a few hours each day volunteering. Combining travel with volunteer work has really taken shape since the creation of sites like Workaway and HelpX. These sites allow anyone who is interested to find volunteering opportunities all over the world, which you can easily apply to be a part of and do some helping out while on the road.
Conclusion
It doesn’t matter which industry you are a part of, knowing the lingo is crucial to making a success of what you are doing. Travel content creation is an exciting niche to be a part of, but as it comes with many different industry hats that creators need to wear at some point or other, you are best off knowing some of the terminology for each of those fields.
So, whether you’re a seasoned traveler or just starting out, learn as much as you can and enjoy the journey. Happy exploring!