How to promote traffic and acquire customers on Zhihu

I deeply agree with what Hua Ye said: "Zhihu users are worthless on Zhihu, but they become very valuable once they are added to WeChat." Online, there are only two ways to attract traffic and acquire customers: tools or content. There is nothing else.

Tools are used to acquire customers. For example, K12 institutions used tools for taking questions to attract traffic in the early years, which brought up a large number of parents and children. Another example is the use of tools for taking questions to attract public examination users.

Content acquisition, for example, the three major portals in the early years, was through selecting major news topics, then through SEO, and cooperating with search engines. This is customer acquisition through content.

But tools also need content to carry them. For example, the K12 question-shooting tool has to provide you with solutions, so "artificial intelligence" - a large team of problem-solvers - came into being. For example, the Chalk Public Examination tool uses real questions from previous years' public examinations and mock questions prepared by teachers for users to practice.

Otherwise, users may leave out of disappointment after coming and report you. For example, there are many apps in the app market that use keywords for unknown reasons.

But in recent years, there are very few opportunities to make tools because all the needs that can be discovered have been discovered.

In the post-mobile Internet era, the focus of acquiring customers lies in content! Zhihu is an excellent platform for acquiring customers through content.

Long contents are easy to cleanse the user’s mind (including pictures, texts, videos, and audios), so the user’s intention is naturally high.

Let me share with you how to get traffic on Zhihu.

I don’t know how to write anything like the 64-step formula, so I just write three dots, and those three dots are enough to communicate.

When it comes to attracting customers, it’s not about the number of tricks you have, but about their effectiveness and their repeated use.

My team has used the following three points on a large scale, and they are sustainable, scalable and SOP-compliant.

1. Follow the trend

I have never tired of emphasizing the importance of following hot topics. Traffic is a collection of demands, and high-concurrency large traffic is a collection of hotspots.

From the perspective of attracting traffic and acquiring customers, except for political hot spots, other hot spots should be followed, or at least we should think about how to follow them!

For example, I have actually cited this example in my other articles, but I still want to talk about it, it is really very important.

The last time I started a business, I was involved in the civil service examination. Every year when the national examination announcement comes out, it is a hot topic. So what can I do? Prepare a question + an answer one month in advance.

As soon as the national civil service exam announcement is released, I will go to Zhihu to ask a question and be the first to answer it.

The question is extremely simple, and every year it is "What do you think of the 20** National Civil Service Examination Announcement?"

Then I invited everyone on the site to answer, and the first person who saw it was my answer, so I got the first wave of traffic.

Let me talk about the data. In the first year, we had more than 20,000 precise customers, and in the second year, we had more than 8,000 precise customers. The reason why it was less in the second year was that after I moved to the private domain, I forgot to turn on the fission function.

What if you feel it is not safe and this issue is not popular? Ask 10 similar questions and review your article 10 times.

First prepare 10 questions and 10 answers, and then distribute them to several accounts to ask and answer them, or invite everyone on the entire site to answer.

If there is no big hotspot, a small hotspot will do, the method is the same. What can we do if it is a temporary hotspot? 2 ways:

1. As a content acquisition person, we should always have some material libraries. When a hot topic comes, we can take out the material libraries, piece them together and put them up for sale.

For example, when I was working in the new media industry for books in my early years, I did something unethical (but I really had no choice because I had to write 8 articles every day, and now I feel guilty when I think about it).

I have written eulogies for some famous authors who are older and have cancer but have not yet passed away, so every time an author dies, I am always the first to post a eulogy...

2. Rush forward first and talk later. If we have not made any preparations, then we can first write some key sentences based on the topic (it is best to provide some incremental information), send them out first, and then slowly enrich your answer, so as to ensure that you can get the first wave of traffic.

2. Zhihu Blue Ocean

Zhihu Blue Ocean refers to the fact that there are a large number of questions on Zhihu that have a large number of readers but very few answers. You just need to catch this wave and you can get a lot of cheap traffic.

Moreover, this kind of traffic is often search-type traffic, so the accuracy is also extremely high!

For example, “national examination” is a big word on Zhihu. Generally speaking, the competition is fierce, but there are also blue oceans.

For example, I limit the number of people who can answer to within 30. We can see from the figure below that there are a lot of questions with a large number of readers (the tool I use is "Geek Growth"), but few answers.

At this time, we just need to answer the questions and then rank them at the top of Zhihu.

To take it to the extreme, if you think 30 answers are still too difficult, then we will limit the number of people who can answer to only 5.

Let’s look at the picture below, “Is it easy to pass the civil service exam in Nanjing?” If I were a local civil service exam agency in Nanjing and was familiar with the exam situation, I would write down what I know and make sure it ranks first.

Now that you have understood this point, it shouldn't be difficult to ask users to add you on WeChat and have in-depth communication with you, right?

3. Zhihu traffic-generating articles

Zhihu traffic-generating article means that we write a traffic-generating article and make it rank among the top few keywords in this category. The specific steps are:

1. Write a lead-in article. The framework and outline of the lead-in article must be clear. If you look at many education-related answers on Zhihu, you will find that there must be several articles that follow this model: show achievements - talk about failures - talk about how to work hard - summarize successful experiences - share information. This is the lead-in article. Polishing a good lead generation article is very important and requires a lot of effort. I suggest you spend even a month just to polish a lead-generating article.

2. Find a traffic studio. After writing the lead article, there is still a second step, which is to think about how to get the article to the front of Zhihu. For example, when you search for "graduate school entrance examination", your article will be the first to appear. There are two ways. One is that your writing is really good and moves the audience, and the audience will click on your posts one by one. However, this method is very slow to take effect and only one in a hundred will be successful. A more conservative way is to find a traffic studio directly (of course you can do this yourself if you have the leisure) and ask them to optimize it for you.

Generally speaking, if the competition is not particularly fierce, the cost of optimization is much less than that of advertising. So, how do you find this kind of traffic studio? A lot of them can be found by searching on QQ. Look at my picture below.

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Author: Kosan

Source: Kosan Senior