How can communities attract traffic and realize monetization at zero cost?

Recently, many community operation partners have complained to us: the KPI indicator set by the boss is to attract thousands of new users every month, but there is not enough funding, and they wish they could attract so many people without spending a penny. Want to attract traffic without spending money? Is there a solution?

Yes, in this case, the best way to attract traffic is to output high-quality content and build personal IP to attract traffic.

When it comes to the creation of personal IP and the monetization of traffic, we have to mention Mr. Zhou Zuoluo. I don’t need to introduce this big guy in detail. He is the former new media operations manager of Chuangyebang, vice president of Chazuo Academy, and chief new media lecturer. He has written hundreds of articles with more than 100,000 views.

Recently, I also finished reading his book "Practical Operation Manual of Public Accounts", which benefited me a lot.

Today I will share with you the skills of building personal IP that I learned from this book, which are the two core elements of content creation: the selection of popular topics and the creation techniques of popular titles.

You know, high-quality content is very scarce in this era.

With popular content, inserting personal contact information in the article will attract readers, thus achieving our goal of attracting traffic.

Without further ado, let’s get straight to the point!

The outline of this article is as follows:

1. 6 ways to help you establish a stable source of materials

2. 4 major criteria to help you select popular topics

3. 4 practical tips to teach you how to write a hit title

1. 6 ways to help you establish a stable source of materials

I wonder if you have ever encountered a problem:

I want to create my own account or keep updating my Moments to build my own IP, but I rely too much on inspiration and often don’t know what to post next after posting one.

So I can only post whatever I can think of. Sometimes, I really don’t know what to write, so I just put some content together and post it. There is no way to guarantee a stable output of high-quality content.

To solve this problem, the fundamental issue is to do a good job in topic planning.

Here are 6 ways to establish a stable source of material:

1. Create a title library

Simply put, the popular headlines you see in your daily circle of friends and on the public accounts you follow can be collected and categorized immediately.

Then think about why this title is good, what techniques it uses, how I should learn from it, and how to summarize generally applicable routines.

Whenever you are out of ideas, take out these high-quality titles and have a look at them. This will give you some new ideas instead of racking your brains to come up with empty thoughts every time.

2. Establish a topic database

There are three directions to approach this:

(1) Sort out all the popular topics you have worked on in your account. Based on these proven successful topics, split them into 5 or more related and similar topics.

(2) Look for popular topics on your competitor’s account and develop your own topics based on them.

(3) Analyze the popular articles that are flooding your friend circle and think about what you can learn and apply.

Although I did a lot of topic analysis, I only used one in the end, but the remaining ones can also serve as a basis for thinking in the future.

3. Build your own library

This material library stores the things you will need when you decide on a topic and start writing an article, including cases, articles, sentences, and pictures. When you encounter good content, you can organize the materials so that you can quickly retrieve cases, articles, and viewpoints when writing.

4. Expand by mining keywords and article types for content positioning

For example, if our show is positioned as community operation, the key words at this time can be community operation, private domain traffic building, community conversion, community activity, IP building, etc.

Common article types include popular science, information, evaluation, grass-planting, methodology, in-depth analysis, insider information, tools, stories, and inventory.

By clarifying these two points, we can choose the types that suit our positioning based on content of different tones and combine them with the positioning. For example, methodology, in-depth analysis, tools, and inventory types combined with the above keywords can give us many topics to choose from.

For example, 10 tips for keeping a community active, 3 major channels for attracting community traffic , etc.

5. Explore user needs and pain points

If you want to find out the users’ needs and pain points, you need to go back to the users’ real life, work, and thinking scenarios. At every step in the process, ask yourself: What difficulties might the users encounter at this step? What help can you provide?

For example, a common problem faced by community operators is that it is difficult to activate, attract traffic, and convert communities. This is when topic selection comes in.

6. Learn from your peers

This is a very effective way to find topics. We must always pay attention to peer accounts, competitor accounts, and accounts of the same type.

Of course, this is not to teach you to steal other people’s topics, but because you have similar positioning and user groups, their topics will give you a lot of inspiration, and they have been verified.

The above is a sharing on how to find topics. Next, I will share with you how to select popular topics from a bunch of topics.

2. 4 major criteria to help you select popular topics

Many friends spent several days writing articles, carefully revised the titles dozens of times, achieved the ultimate in typesetting, and used beautiful pictures. They really worked hard and used all kinds of writing and promotion techniques, but in the end the number of readers was terrible.

This is also the problem I encountered not long ago. I have found the specific reason and would like to share it with you.

In fact, 80% of whether an article can become a hit is determined by the topic.

If you don’t choose the topic well, your subsequent efforts are doomed to be inefficient.

In many cases, we are willing to spend hours polishing articles and titles, but ignore the core point - topic selection. Or we know that topic selection is important, but do not have a rational standard, and everything is based on feelings, so the final data is also based on luck.

Once you understand this point, you will know that choosing a topic is not based on feeling or luck.

Here are 4 criteria for selecting popular topics:

1. Does the topic cover a large enough population?

This actually has to do with how many people may read it, and the population covered by the topic is also the potential number of readers of the topic.

Some topics can cover 10 million people, so it is not that difficult to write an article with 100,000+ readers; but if the topic can only cover 100,000 people in total, then writing an article with 100,000+ readers may be harder than climbing a mountain.

2. Is the topic selection angle enough to have pain points?

Whether there are enough pain points is related to how much resonance the readers can have when reading. If you want to judge whether your topic can become a hit, it depends on whether your topic can hit the pain points of enough people.
3. Has the topic been overconsumed?

This is also why many hot topics need to be followed as quickly as possible. Users are more likely to feel fresh about the new hot topics. If users have read too many articles of the same type, they will have already figured out the whole story and will not be willing to read the same type of content anymore.

4. How many people are willing to actively spread the word

Here we need to understand the user's motivation for forwarding and sharing.

It may be to express one's own opinions, it may be altruism, it may be to take sides, it may be to seek resonance, or it may be to shape an image of oneself.

If you want users to help spread your product, at least one motivation must be satisfied. If you can satisfy several of the user's motivations, the possibility of a hit will increase.

The above are the four standards for selecting popular topics. Of course, the population base of some niche vertical professional fields is very small, so it is difficult to make the topics cover a large enough population, but it is possible to achieve relatively large coverage. In addition, if the title, content, layout, etc. are done well, I believe the final data will not be too bad for the entire industry.

After talking about the topic selection, the title is also a core link that affects the number of readings.

Next, I will share with you 4 practical tips for creating popular titles.

3. 4 practical tips to teach you how to write a hit title

1. Learn to gain popularity

Most users will not care about what an ordinary person says or does. Users may only be interested when celebrities have new developments.

The techniques of gaining popularity can be roughly divided into the following four categories:

1) Famous people

If the topic of your article content includes some well-known people, or is related to well-known people, you can put the names of these well-known people in the title.

Celebrities are eye-catchers, which is the simplest, most direct and most effective way to attract users.

For example: Nian Shiyi: "The Secret that Luo Zhenyu Will Never Tell You".

2) Authoritative titles

We often encounter a problem during our creation, that is, although the character we write about is very powerful and authoritative, he or she is not very well-known.

At this time, we can make use of their titles, such as authoritative titles in companies, institutions, and organizations, because everyone has a high degree of recognition of these titles and they are very eye-catching.

For example: "Cao Fei, Product Director of Tencent: Why am I still extremely panicked after working for ten years? 》.

3) Authoritative institutions

Authoritative organizations are not only well-known, but their officiality and authority also have the power to convince people, thus making users want to read.

For example: Chuangyebang: "Tsinghua scholar's entrepreneurship is valued at 20 billion after 4 years! The biggest failure in Xu Xiaoping’s investment career was missing him! 》

4) Hot events

Almost all important festivals are hot topics, and we can all try to catch up with them, such as the Mid-Autumn Festival, National Day, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and so on.

For example: Mimi Meng: "On Valentine's Day, I queued up for divorce at the Civil Affairs Bureau." This article takes advantage of the holiday's popularity.

2. Use numbers wisely

Numbers can quickly capture the user's attention, and are particularly obvious and recognizable when the article is displayed in the circle of friends.

Any shocking number can be put in the title, and the following numbers can be used:

1) The character’s age in digits

For example: "He started his business at the age of 56, but now his profit is 1.5 times that of Huawei. He is a man who makes his opponents tremble! 》

2) Numbers indicating time

For example: "Behind the $35 billion in 4 years, this is how Didi eliminated 30 competitors! 》

3) Numbers related to money

For example: "What is the difference between a copywriter with a monthly salary of 3,000 and a copywriter with a monthly salary of 30,000? 》

4) Numbers replace adjectives

For example: If you replace "What is it like to have many houses in first- and second-tier cities" with "What is it like to have 20 houses in first- and second-tier cities", the feeling will immediately be different.

3. Arouse user resonance

If your article has nothing to do with users, then no matter how well you write it, users will not read it.

Therefore, when we come up with a title, we need to resonate with users, that is, increase their sense of involvement, so that users can feel that "the article is related to me" or "it is useful to me."

1) Identity Tags

Each of us has many labels, and people usually automatically classify themselves into a circle based on these labels.

For example, in “I Want to Understand Leo” by “Chen Maoyuan Constellation”, the label is Leo.

2) Emotional resonance

One is to make users feel when they see such a title: This is what I think, and you think the same as me.

For example: Mimi Meng: "Is it wrong for me to lend you money? 》.

One is to display the title of reading rewards, so that users will feel as soon as they see it: I can get such rewards by reading this article.

For example: Brain hole operation: "With it, you can make a poster in 2 minutes."

One is to describe the scene, which is a more intuitive way of expression than words and can leave a deeper impression on users.

For example: Mimi Meng: "After cutting my hair, I cried because I looked so ugly."

4. Hit the user’s pain points

This can be expanded on from the seven dimensions of human nature: arrogance, jealousy, rage, laziness, greed, lust and gluttony.

1) Arrogance

The essence of arrogance is a sense of superiority.

Everything that is posted on WeChat Moments is an attempt to show off one’s sense of superiority.

The sense of superiority includes superiority, narcissism, vanity, showing off, achievement, etc.

For example: Nian Gao Mama: "Take your children out like this during the New Year and you’ll get 800% of the people turning around to look at you."

2) Jealousy

The word "jealousy" includes emotions such as dissatisfaction, complaints, comparisons, competition, and vanity.

When people see a title like this, they usually think: How can this be possible? Why didn't I do it? I want to know how I can do that.

For example: Mimi Meng: "How come she was promoted three times and her monthly salary increased from 4,000 to 40,000 in just two years after graduation? 》.

3) Rage: People usually don’t express their anger directly in real life because they consider the need to maintain social relationships, but these negative emotions also need an outlet.

Many articles on public accounts serve as this outlet, and users express their dissatisfaction, anger and other emotions by forwarding your articles.

For example: Mimi Meng: "Is it wrong for me to lend you money? ! 》.

4) Laziness

Laziness is not about getting something for nothing, but a combination of ways of thinking such as doing less and getting more, paying less and getting more in return, investing less and getting more income, working less and making more money, etc.

For example: Plug-in Academy: "How to choose a title with a reading volume of 100,000+? 14 templates for direct application (save first)”.

5) Greed

Information involving free, discounted, low-investment, high-return products often attracts users to click.

For example: A Cat Who Is So Busy at Work: How to Finish 365 Books in a Year and Beat 99% of My Peers? 》.

6) Lust

The "sex" mentioned here does not refer to sex or color, but words related to sex and color themselves have the function of attracting attention.

I won’t give you any examples here, haha.

7) Overeating

When writing a title, we can justify the meaning of "eating" with confidence, making everyone feel that loving food is a natural thing, and only those who know how to eat know how to live.

For example: Mimi Meng: "Here are 50 snack gift packs for you"

The above is all I have shared this time. This article has more than 4,500 words and it took me a week to summarize and organize it. I hope it can help you solve the problem of using content to build personal IP.

Author: Community Operation Research Institute

Source: Community Operation Research Institute