The creator's glossary.
Terms from AI, automation, Instagram and digital products, explained in plain words. Each one has a worked example, the mistakes people make, and dated sources for any number it quotes.
A
- AEOAnswer Engine OptimizationAEO, or answer engine optimization, is the practice of making your content easy for AI assistants and answer features to find, understand and cite when they respond to a question.Marketing
- Affiliate MarketingAffiliate marketing is earning a commission when someone buys a product through your personal tracking link.Creator Economy
- Agentic AIAgentic AI is software in which an AI model decides its own next steps and uses tools to carry out a goal, instead of following a path a person wrote in advance.AI & Technology
- AI AutomationAI automation is the use of an AI model inside an automated workflow, so that steps needing judgment, such as reading, sorting or drafting, run without a person doing each one by hand.AI & Technology
- AI InfluencerAn AI influencer is a social media persona whose face, voice or whole identity is generated with AI tools and run by a person or a team behind the scenes.Creator Economy
- APIApplication Programming InterfaceAn API, or application programming interface, is a defined way for one piece of software to ask another for data or to tell it to do something.Automation Tools
C
- ChatGPTChatGPT is OpenAI's AI assistant: you type or speak a request and a large language model writes the reply.AI Models
- ClaudeClaude is the AI assistant and family of large language models made by Anthropic.AI Models
- ComfyUIComfyUI is a free, open-source program for running AI image and video models, in which you build each generation process as a graph of connected nodes.AI Models
- Content PillarA content pillar is one of the few core topics an account returns to again and again, so that the audience knows what to expect and the creator knows what to make.Instagram Growth
- Content StrategyA content strategy is a plan for what you will publish, for whom, where and how often, and for how you will tell whether it is working.Instagram Growth
- Conversion RateConversion rate is the percentage of people who take the action you wanted, such as buying or signing up, out of everyone who had the chance.Marketing
- CopywritingCopywriting is writing meant to move a reader to take an action, such as clicking, signing up or buying.Marketing
- Creator EconomyThe creator economy is the market of people who earn money from content and audiences they build online, together with the platforms and tools that serve them.Creator Economy
E
- Email MarketingEmail marketing is building a list of people who have agreed to hear from you and sending them emails that inform, help and, at times, sell.Marketing
- EmbeddingAn embedding is a list of numbers that represents the meaning of a piece of text, an image or other content, so that a computer can measure how similar two things are.AI & Technology
- Engagement RateEngagement rate is the share of people who interacted with a post, found by dividing its interactions by its reach, its views or the account's follower count.Instagram Growth
G
- GeminiGemini is Google's AI assistant and the family of AI models behind it, built to work with text, images, audio and video.AI Models
- GEOGenerative Engine OptimizationGEO, or generative engine optimization, is the practice of improving how often and how accurately AI systems that generate answers mention and cite your content.Marketing
I
- Instagram AlgorithmThe Instagram algorithm is the set of ranking systems Instagram uses to decide which posts each person sees, and in what order, in Feed, Stories, Reels and Explore.Instagram Growth
- Instagram ReelsReels are Instagram's short vertical videos, shown full screen in the Reels tab and in the feed, and recommended to people who do not follow the account.Instagram Growth
L
- Landing PageA landing page is a single web page built around one offer and one action, such as signing up or buying, with little else to distract the visitor.Marketing
- Lead MagnetA lead magnet is something useful you give away free in exchange for a person's email address, so that you can stay in touch with them.Digital Products
- LLMLarge Language ModelA large language model, or LLM, is an AI system trained on a very large amount of text to predict what comes next, which lets it write, summarize, translate and answer questions.AI & Technology
- LoRALow-Rank AdaptationA LoRA is a small add-on file that teaches an existing AI model something new, such as a particular face or art style, without retraining the whole model.AI Models
M
- Makeformerly IntegromatMake is a hosted visual automation platform, formerly called Integromat, in which you build workflows called scenarios by connecting modules on a canvas.Automation Tools
- MonetizationMonetization is the process of turning an audience, content or skill into income.Creator Economy
N
- n8nn8n is a workflow automation tool in which you connect apps and AI models by linking steps, called nodes, on a visual canvas.Automation Tools
- Niche DownTo niche down is to narrow your focus to a specific audience and a specific problem, so that the right people quickly recognize that you are for them.Creator Economy
P
- Passive IncomePassive income is money that keeps coming in without you working for each payment, though in practice almost every source needs work to set up and more work to keep going.Digital Products
- Personal BrandingPersonal branding is the deliberate work of shaping what people associate with your name: what you do, who you help and how you come across.Creator Economy
- PPVPay-Per-ViewPPV, short for pay-per-view, is a post or message on a subscription platform that a fan pays once to unlock, on top of or instead of the monthly subscription price.Creator Economy
- Prompt EngineeringPrompt engineering is the practice of writing and testing the instructions you give an AI model so that it produces the result you want reliably.AI & Technology
S
- Sales FunnelA sales funnel is the series of steps that takes a stranger from first noticing you to buying, drawn as a funnel because fewer people remain at each step.Digital Products
- SEOSearch Engine OptimizationSEO, or search engine optimization, is the work of making your pages easy for search engines to find and understand, so that they appear when people search for what you offer.Marketing
- Stable DiffusionStable Diffusion is a family of AI image models from Stability AI that turn a text description into a picture and can be downloaded and run on your own computer.AI Models
- Subscription PlatformA subscription platform is a website where fans pay a creator a recurring price for access to that creator's posts and messages, and the platform keeps a share of each payment.Creator Economy
V
- Vector DatabaseA vector database stores embeddings, which are lists of numbers that represent meaning, and finds the stored items closest in meaning to a query.AI & Technology
- Viral ContentViral content is a post that spreads far beyond the account's usual audience because viewers share it and the platform keeps recommending it.Instagram Growth
W
- WebhookA webhook is a message one app sends to a web address you choose the moment something happens, so that your system can react straight away.Automation Tools
- Workflow AutomationWorkflow automation is the use of software to carry out a repeatable series of steps across your apps when a set event happens, without someone doing each step by hand.Automation Tools