Promotion and traffic generation: How to use Zhihu to attract traffic and fans?

I believe everyone knows Zhihu, which gathers probably the highest quality fan group on the Internet so far. According to data revealed by Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan in September this year, as of the end of August 2018, the number of Zhihu users has exceeded 200 million.

Zhihu's initial user positioning tends to be towards mid- to high-end knowledge groups. Although such groups are of high quality and easy to monetize, it is difficult to attract traffic with simple methods, so many readers feel that Zhihu is a relatively difficult platform to operate.

With the surge in the number of Zhihu users and the launch of monetization functions such as Zhihu LIVE, more and more traffic is gathered on Zhihu. The original mid- to high-end knowledge groups have gradually become a small part of the 160 million users, so Zhihu now has certain traffic-generating value for us.

1. Advantages that can be utilized

Zhihu has a partnership with Sogou, so many people will ask, what does the partnership between Zhihu and Sogou have to do with me? Of course it does!

For platforms that have cooperated with Sogou, relevant content on the platform will be pushed to the front end first. Zhihu is one of them, so we can often see that some answers on Zhihu are ranked ahead of Baidu.

For us, not only can we attract traffic through Zhihu, but we also have the opportunity to get a better ranking in Sogou search and gain secondary exposure.

In addition, Zhihu’s recommendation mechanism is different from other platforms. If you often browse Zhihu, you will find that some answers with a particularly high number of likes are not ranked particularly high.

Some posts with thousands of likes will even appear below those with dozens of likes, so I don’t recommend you to do operations like brushing likes. Don’t ask me why, the account used for previous testing has been blocked. Sometimes, opportunistic practices like brushing likes will only lead to self-destruction in the end.

Ranking and user account weight:

The ranking is related to the weight value of the user who answered the question. If the answer is liked by a Zhihu celebrity or a high-authority account, then even if there are only a few likes, we will have the opportunity to be recommended by the platform.

According to the above mechanism, we can look for and join such groups, and find old users with high weights to like and help each other, so as to improve the recommendation weight of our answers.

In addition, if the number of followers in the vertical field we choose is only around tens of thousands, then we generally only need a few high-weight likes to reach a relatively high position in the topic.

This push mechanism is much more convenient than spending a lot of money to increase the volume on other platforms, and the cost is also much lower.

And the exposure will not be worse than those platforms that rely on inflating the volume. After all, our exposure under the topic directly corresponds to precise traffic. The value of one precise user can be equal to the value of 100 non-precise users.

Another big advantage of Zhihu is that Zhihu itself does not prohibit us from directing traffic to Zhihu . Whether it is at the end of the article or in the personal profile column, you can attract traffic by directly inserting our WeChat or official account.

2. Points to note in drainage practice

Initial account creation

1. There are no special requirements for the account during the initial registration. You only need to use your mobile phone to authenticate your Zhihu account, and then the ID must comply with the platform rules.

2. The issue of maintaining an account. The pace of maintaining an account is to reply once a day in the first week, which can fluctuate. One month after the account is registered, the system will determine your account weight based on the quality and frequency of your answers. How to position the account in a better "segment" is to find some high-weight users in the group to like it.

3. When multiple accounts use the same device, the IP needs to be changed after each operation. You can search on Baidu for how to change your IP address, but many software of this type are either paid or have very poor effects. Here I will share one that I use frequently, with unlimited trial.

If multiple accounts frequently log in and out of a device, the system will suspect that it is a machine operation and determine that you have violated the rules. What is the purpose of multiple accounts?

To increase your exposure, you can probably guess whether it is better to have one account with a high ranking answer or multiple accounts with high rankings to attract traffic to the same question.

Daily Operations

4. The word count of a highly-praised answer is controlled at around 800-1500 words. The answers are mostly in the form of pictures and texts, data analysis, and citation-based responses. Zhihu users focus more on logic than emotion.

Users on Zhihu are particularly averse to soft-text advertisements. What they want to see most is content with valuable information + personal experience + humorous and teasing tone + a brilliant last paragraph + fresh logical reasoning + discussion in sections and points.

Only such replies can gain likes, collections, and comments, and will also increase the weight of your account and gain ranking.

5. The questions you ask must be popular topics on Zhihu. These topics have large traffic and many followers. If you only answer unpopular topics, no one will see them for a long time.

The answers must be controversial and valuable, and even if they are witty, they must reach new heights. Also make full use of the comment section below the answer to maintain high interaction with fans.

6. Try not to use the same answer multiple times. If detected by the system, you will easily be punished. The first violation may result in a one-day or seven-day ban, or even the user’s data and all answers may be cleared and blocked. You can leave a link in your answer to guide users to view it.

7. Do not leave too conspicuous contact information or public account QR code in your answer. Zhihu tacitly allows big Vs to leave contact information, but ordinary users or small Vs will be banned if they are discovered or reported.

8. When you have already given a certain number of answers on Zhihu and have accumulated some fans. You can make preliminary preparations for diversion.

At this time, modify your account information and add your contact information. Don’t add too many contact information to avoid suspicion of marketing.

9. The Zhihu system has a feature that if the number of answers exceeds ten in a day or the number of answers is too high for a long time, the system will prompt frequent operations. To avoid unnecessary trouble, the best number of answers per day should be controlled between 5-7.

10. Zhihu users are active between 9:00-11:00 in the afternoon and 13:00-14:00 in the evening. Generally, it is rare for users to be punished for answering questions in violation of regulations during these time periods.

11. Even if posting external links on Zhihu does not attract traffic, a high-quality external link will improve the ranking of the website's keywords in search engines, because external links can help improve rankings.

By fermenting topics on Zhihu, they will be endorsed by professionals with credibility, thus generating in-depth content and then being spread a second time.

Behavior avoidance

11. If you already have a record of violations, the system will carefully review the content of your posts every time you post in the future.

12. Don’t touch on sensitive topics. We go to Zhihu to answer questions to attract traffic to our accounts, not to express our own thoughts and ideas. If we are permanently banned for involving such issues, then all the efforts we have made before will be in vain.

13. If you encounter any problems, please provide feedback to Zhihu’s housekeeper immediately. There is a real person behind this account, not a machine. So it’s easier to communicate.

3. Monetization Operation Ideas

If we can accumulate a certain amount of accurate fans on Zhihu, we actually don’t need to direct fans here and there. The Zhihu live function provided by Zhihu can help us quickly realize accurate traffic monetization.

Users who can be active on a knowledge platform for a long time will definitely be more receptive to the concept of paying for knowledge. Moreover, the precise traffic on this platform basically has the purchasing power and can easily accept courses that cost a few or a dozen yuan.

Then we can open relevant courses ourselves to guide the monetization of our traffic on Zhihu.

However, not every reader has the energy to prepare a special course. If we want to realize the monetization of courses, we can only consider copying other people's courses.

Users on Zhihu have certain requirements for the quality of courses, so we need to carefully select from these course resources, choose courses that match the areas corresponding to the precise traffic we have, and then perform pseudo-original transcription.

However, when conducting monetization operations on Zhihu LIVE, we need to pay attention that we need to pay a deposit before we can activate this function.

In addition, Zhihu platform has stricter content review. If we publish relevant courses after simple pseudo-original changes, we may lose the deposit if we violate the rules or are reported.

Therefore, readers need to make their own discretion when using this function. Zhihu's traffic-generating effect is very stable. With good preparations in the early stages, it can passively attract traffic and increase followers in the later stages, and perform batch amplification operations. Interested friends can try it.

Source: Lu Songsong