Super complete Douyin monetization methods and methods to increase fans

As an internet product person, I am only now starting to seriously study TikTok, which is actually quite a failure.

In the past, I thought that TikTok was a platform for creating internet celebrities, which used recommendation algorithms to keep you swiping, consuming your time and energy, and had the mentality of a viewer. I realized it later and only saw the complaints themselves, but ignored why they were happening and what opportunities we could have in these complaints. This is the insight that a mature product person should have.

A product that is easy for the elderly to use and is addictive for men, women, young and old, regardless of those high-growth operational strategies, the product itself is worth studying and thinking about.

Only when the product experience is extreme can everyone use it easily. Now Douyin no longer has a clear target user. In other words, everyone is its user. In this era of attention competition, addiction means extremely high user stickiness. If you change your perspective from consumer to producer, you will find that this is a high-quality publicity and promotion platform.

1. Short video market size

Let’s first look at the current size and prospects of the short video market. As of December 2020, the number of Internet users in my country was 989 million, and the number of online video (including short video) users reached 927 million, an increase of 76.33 million from March 2020, accounting for 93.7% of the total number of Internet users; among them, the number of short video users was 873 million, an increase of 100 million from March 2020, accounting for 88.3% of the total number of Internet users.

Benefiting from the fact that short videos can capture the rich connotations of wonderful moments and achieve real-time interaction in a more natural and face-to-face way, videos are becoming increasingly popular as a form of online experience content.

The gap between Douyin and Kuaishou has gradually widened. At the same time, the competition for users is a zero-sum game. Where there is gain, there is loss, and Weishi is the worst hit.

The average monthly usage time of short videos is close to 30 hours per person, which means that each person spends an average of 1 hour on Douyin every day, and this is for 30 consecutive days. It’s quite scary to think about it, so if you occasionally spend a few hours on it, think about it and see if it’s nothing.

According to the growth trend chart of Douyin’s daily active users, Douyin’s target for daily active users across all platforms in 2021 is 700 million. With a population of 1.4 billion in China, half of them will use Douyin every day. Douyin has become the fourth largest super application after WeChat, Taobao, and Alipay, and is already a truly national application.

2. Douyin monetization methods

During the process of understanding for several months, I found that Douyin's monetization methods are very diverse, half of which are official support plans. This indirectly shows that Douyin has strong profitability. The following is a list of Douyin's common monetization methods, which I believe will give you some ideas.

Method 1: Live streaming

Since 2018, live streaming has become an important sales method in e-commerce and the most understandable way to monetize. Selling things is the essence of doing business. As long as you have 1,000 fans and publish more than 10 videos, you can use the shared cart to sell goods.

To sell goods through live streaming, you don’t necessarily need a strong product selection team like the top anchors. After all, not everyone can become Li Jiaqi. As an ordinary person, it is still possible to make a good living by becoming an unknown small anchor. Choosing products from small stores on Douyin, or selling your own products (such as factories, offline stores), or even homemade products (such as rice dumplings, hot sauce, courses, and home-brewed wine) are all good sales channels.

Method 2: Live show

There are no threshold requirements for show live broadcasts. In the past, one may have to have good looks, talent, and knowledge to attract fans, but now because the crowd on Douyin is very diverse, there may be people who like all kinds of things, so the overall show live broadcast has become more diverse;

For example, you can do it outdoors, sleep, watch a movie with you, lip sync, or even sit there quietly, satisfying the curiosity of different people. The main income comes from tips, 1 sound wave = 0.1 yuan, and the Douyin system will take 53% of the fees, leaving only 47%, which can be withdrawn through the background.

Method 3: Product display window

The yellow cart on the anchor’s homepage or in the lower left corner of the video is also a common way to monetize. As long as you have 1,000 fans and have posted more than 10 short videos, you can open it and earn commissions by selling goods.

The threshold is relatively low, but the content requirements for the products are high. It is best to combine it with videos. For example, food anchors can naturally use the required products in the food production process, making others feel that it is because of this product that the dish can be made so easily, thereby increasing the desire to place an order.

Method 4: Star Map Mission

The Star Map Platform is Douyin's official promotion task order-taking platform. Its main functions are to provide advertising task matching services for brand owners, MCN companies and celebrities/influencers, and collect commissions or additional fees from them. The Star Map Platform can realize functions such as order reception, contracted influencer management, project aggregation, data viewing, etc., to achieve the connection and communication of multiple transaction roles in the content transaction process.

If the number of fans reaches more than 10,000, you can open the Star Map, which is officially guaranteed, with many tasks and guaranteed safety, but a certain handling fee will also be charged; of course, you can also take orders privately, such as adding WeChat, but there is a possibility of someone running away without paying.

Generally, Star Map advertising fees range from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands, depending on the number of fans. For a million fans, it usually ranges from 10,000 to 30,000, and for tens of millions fans, it ranges from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of thousands.

Method 5: Medium video plan

The mid-length video is a creator incentive program launched by Douyin, Toutiao and Xigua Video in June this year. One video can earn three shares of the revenue.

Video requirements:

1. Publish three horizontal videos (16:9), with a duration of 1 minute;
2. The total number of views on the three platforms is 17,000.

Calculating the revenue based on playback, a normal 10,000 playbacks on Xigua platform may only earn a few yuan, but after adding mid-length videos, it can be more than ten or even dozens of yuan, which can be said to be very attractive. It is one of the best ways to realize revenue at present. Knowledge and film and television anchors are very suitable for making mid-length videos;

After joining the medium-length video plan, there will be a Xigua Video logo in the lower left corner.

Method 6: Game Publisher Program

"Game Publisher Program" is Douyin's official game content marketing aggregation platform. Advertisers publish game promotion tasks through the "Game Distributor Program", and Douyin creators take orders to create videos, increasing the amount of game content on the Douyin platform and improving the scale and activity of game users. The platform further empowers mini-game developers and helps the development of high-quality mini-games;

It is suitable for people who have plenty of spare time and love to play games, and it is more suitable for beginners.

Method 7: Car auction money making plan

The plan to make money by photographing cars is an official cash reward task platform for car experts initiated by DoCar and Douyin. You can earn income by taking videos of related cars.

Search for "Car Auction Earning Plan" on TikTok to enter the promotion homepage, click to participate in the plan, 0 fans can participate, you can upload videos, pictures and other content, and post the video on the task page. After the task is sent, there will be a car link in the lower left corner of the video. As long as the fans click on the link, they can get income (Note: Apple phones cannot see the link).

Method 8: National Mission

Search for "National Mission" on TikTok, or find the National Mission in the Creator Center to enter. According to the requirements of the task, tag the relevant accounts and bring up relevant topics. You don't need to live broadcast or sell goods. You will earn as much as the number of views.

This monetization model is suitable for newcomers. There is no threshold for opening. Each task has specific requirements and references, which reduces the difficulty of production. As long as you strictly follow the requirements and bring up the task topic, the income will naturally come.

Method 9: Task Center

Find the national mission from the Creator Center and enter. There are industry missions such as games, cars, beauty, and food. Like the national missions, each task has specific requirements and references. People with 0 fans can participate and just bring up relevant topics.

Method 10: Maoyan Movie

Search for "Maoyan Movie" on TikTok and enter the homepage. Select a movie with a high rating, download the trailer for secondary editing, and then click "Shoot TikTok" in the upper right corner of the movie page to upload the video. You will earn money if someone buys movie tickets (Note: the link cannot be seen on Apple phones).

Method 11: PICK plan

The PICK program encourages influencers to naturally and creatively embed advertising information. The award level standard is based on the work's 14-day playback volume/likes/comments/implantation quality and other comprehensive performance to assess the video level and receive corresponding bonuses. There is no limit to the number of videos that can be released.

The PICK plan has a high threshold, requiring 100,000 fans, and the recent works have about 1,000 likes. The content is high-quality and the account is vertical. The high threshold means high returns. It is equivalent to Tmall in tasks. The tasks include games + star map tasks + Jianying tasks + Dongchedi + Xigua Toutiao + real estate tasks, etc. Most of them have no upper limit on income;

What’s interesting is that its entrance is not on Douyin, but on WeChat. You need to search for the PICK Talent Program on WeChat, enter and bind your Douyin account, fill in your identity information and bank card information, etc., bind your Douyin account and wait for review;

Method 12: Knowledge Monetization Star Plan

If you want to be a knowledge blogger, here comes your chance. In September 2021, the official will personally teach you how to be a knowledge anchor, teach you how to monetize, teach you how to live broadcast, and give you traffic. The most important thing is that it is completely free. Click the registration button and wait for the official Douyin phone call to contact you.

Method 13: TikTok Mini Program

Search for "FunWanFunTest" in TikTok, enter the mini program homepage, select your favorite test to try out and record a video, then return to the test page and click on "Post to TikTok" in the upper right corner to post it.

Method 14: Group buying

Group buying and selling is a "life service rebate plan" launched by Douyin, which mainly focuses on selling goods in the same city. Search for "sales expert" on Douyin or enter from "Creator Service Center-All Categories-Content Monetization-Group Buying and Selling", post a video to add a rebateable location, and users can enter the location details page through their works. If they successfully purchase the goods and use them in the store, they can get a cash rebate reward.

Application requirements: 1,000 followers and 5 videos with location on personal homepage. Application is free.

Method 15: Same-city project

With the disappearance of the demographic dividend of mobile Internet, in-depth exploration of offline scenarios has become a new source of business growth, and the high-frequency and rigid demand for local life consumption is a huge piece of cake. Douyin, which has huge traffic, will naturally not miss it. It will connect online and offline to obtain greater possibilities. Douyin has increased its investment in local life since the end of last year, and it has been reported that the internal testing of "Heart-warming Takeaway" has been launched. It is not difficult to see that 2021 is an important strategic direction for Douyin's local project.

The local city project involves so much content, including catering, life services, leisure and entertainment, real estate, matchmaking, blind dates for middle-aged and elderly people, local city recruitment, etc. There is also an exclusive local life recommendation section and exclusive traffic blessing.

It is very suitable for those who have offline physical stores or local resources, and do vertical in-depth cultivation, obtain accurate fans through Douyin traffic, and then operate in private domain. Whether it is by taking advantage of free traffic or investing in Dou+, customers can be acquired at a lower cost.

Method 16: Douyin Store

As the name suggests, it means opening a store on Douyin. The only difference from Taobao is that you don’t need to promote it. The traffic comes from the showcases of alliance influencers. Of course, you can also promote it yourself, but everyone has their own expertise.

Many people choose to have no source of goods and go to Pinduoduo, 1688 and other platforms to purchase goods. Being a middleman is also a low-risk way to start a business. It requires small investment and does not require inventory pressure, so it is more friendly to newcomers. However, it may not last long, and profits will become lower and lower in the later period. However, Douyin e-commerce is still in its wild growth period, and there is still a bonus window.

To open a small store, you only need to prepare a business license, a photo of the legal person’s ID card, and a bank account number, which is relatively simple; then you can select products, certify the store, and ship the goods every day.

Method 17: Pay for knowledge

Compared with audio and pictures, videos have richer forms of expression and are the best carrier of knowledge. As a platform with the best traffic at present, Douyin has classic cases of becoming famous overnight, stimulating more ordinary people to want to turn their lives around through this platform. However, most people are limited by their own abilities and experience, and do not have the patience to continue learning. They just want to get started quickly and make money. The only solution to the conflict between expectations and reality is to learn from successful people.

On the one hand, there is strong demand, and on the other hand, knowledge payment itself has the characteristics of low threshold, strong replicability and high profit, which has also prompted a large number of people to enter, and there are good and bad people; some sell their own recorded courses, some teach live, some teach in the community, some do porting, etc. The fee range is also very wide, from a few dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, which tests people's judgment.

This is a stage of wild growth, and knowledge payment is in line with Douyin's strategy, because all Internet companies are competing for users' time. In order to make people spend more time on the platform, the original 15-second short video can no longer meet the demand. Therefore, medium-length videos of 1 to 30 minutes have become the content that Douyin wants to focus on supporting. To convey a piece of knowledge well, the time coincides with the medium-length video. Therefore, Douyin is also vigorously promoting knowledge payment content. Not only does it personally participate in training, but it also has a large amount of traffic recommendations. I believe there will still be dividends for several years.

Method 18: Build your own IP

This society is not very friendly to middle-aged people, especially middle-aged men. We like to discuss their stress at work and their greasiness in life, and assign them many roles: he is a leader or backbone at work, a father in the family, a son of his parents, and a father in society, but there is no oneself. Putting aside these roles, who are you? After the age of 35, we face various crises, but life is still long. In order not to be abandoned by society, we need to turn ourselves into IPs.

In this era, traffic has reached its peak and opportunities for big entrepreneurship have become fewer and fewer, but there are still many niche industries that provide opportunities for ordinary people like us. If we want to leverage this opportunity as individuals, we need to build ourselves into an IP.

An internet celebrity is a type of personal IP. He has a clear label. People will follow this person and buy the products he recommends because they like him. As long as this person exists, there will be people following him. When introducing himself, you can proudly say, who am I and what can I bring to you?

If you want to build a personal IP, you must first choose a vertical niche, output your own valuable content, and promote yourself through the free traffic of Douyin. You don’t need that many fans, a few thousand or tens of thousands will be fine, as long as it is accurate enough, you can monetize it. It is faster to attract fans on Douyin than on other platforms, and it is possible to leverage large traffic. This low-probability game is fascinating, and Douyin can show yourself from multiple dimensions. The entire personality will be more three-dimensional, the trust will be higher, and it will be easier to monetize. Building a personal IP on Douyin may be the last chance for ordinary people to turn over.

Method 19: Raise and sell accounts

Some film and television editing accounts, celebrity accounts, entertainment and comedy accounts... are very easy to attract fans. The disadvantage is that their stickiness and conversion ability are particularly poor, and they are easily suspected of plagiarism and blocked. However, if they can be sold quickly, the profits can also be considerable.

Currently, the market price of 1k fans is 100-150, 3k fans is 200-300, 10,000 fans is 400-500, and one million fans is about tens of thousands of yuan. Of course, if you master the following technology, it can also be a good way to make money.

Method 20: Creative Editor

Jianying is a video editing software officially launched by Douyin. Compared with professional PR editing software, Jianying is a much simpler product, and really everyone can use it. Product people can actually learn from it. It is a very challenging task to simplify complex software.

Search for the "Jianying" public account on WeChat, click Service-Creator Recruitment in the menu, and submit your application. Jianying has five ways to monetize:

1. Template creation benefits
2. Paid template income
3. Paid course income
4. Activity bonus income
5. Business cooperation benefits

Creators are divided into levels, from LV0 to LV8. The rights and interests of each level are different. The higher the level, the more rights and interests.

Method 21: Tik Tok agent operation

Just like Taobao, not everyone can understand e-commerce. Similarly, not everyone understands Douyin. However, Douyin has 700 million traffic per day. Everyone is trying to get on it. Seeing their peers making a lot of money online, some companies and businesses are also very anxious.

However, due to the limitations of my own abilities, starting from scratch would require many pitfalls and rebuilding the team. Not to mention the results, the initial labor costs are also a considerable expense. Moreover, there are not many people who are good at short videos, and talent is very scarce.

So the demand emerged, and where there is demand there is a market, and Douyin's agency operation has its value. It can provide enterprises or merchants with account IP positioning, fan growth, operation, monetization... a whole set of online solutions are outsourced to the agency operation team. This is a mutually beneficial process.

Method 22: Accept tasks from anchors + provide tools

Of course, when everyone is rushing to make money, everyone wants to be a sponsor. This track is highly competitive. We can settle for the second best and act as a water seller. There are hundreds of millions of bloggers or anchors on Douyin, and most of them work alone. When making videos, they cannot avoid editing, dubbing, copywriting, shooting and other contents. Because sometimes one person is really too busy, and it is not cost-effective to hire full-time people, so there will be a large demand for part-time workers. You can see recruitment information on the blogger’s homepage. If you have free time and have skills in this area, you can try it and learn closely from excellent anchors.

Of course, in addition to this kind of part-time job, you can also provide them with tools to write copy, dub, find materials, design pictures, provide data, etc., as long as they are frequently used in video production, especially some time-consuming and labor-intensive, or most anchors cannot do it themselves. If there are tools that can help them improve efficiency and solve pain points, many people will definitely pay for it.

Method 23: Sell USB flash drives

The charm of music lies in its ability to quickly resonate with your spirit and release your emotions. People often stay for such music and listen to it several times. I believe that music accounts have a high completion rate. The film and television and music accounts on Douyin have a very fast growth in followers, and the same content can be posted on multiple accounts.

At the beginning, I couldn’t figure out how to monetize this kind of account until one day I saw someone asking for a USB flash drive in the comments, and then I realized that it could be monetized this way.

Official account recommendation

In order to help more people make money, Douyin has also taken great pains and launched many official accounts to provide the most authoritative and professional answers to different questions, and teach you step by step how to use it yourself. This is also the platform that I have seen that makes ordinary people worry the most. It provides live explanations for 12 hours a day, teaching rules, skills, and benefits. They are afraid that you don’t understand, so they explain it over and over again. The explanation is done using the same method that your elementary school teacher taught you. It is really thoughtful.

Here are the top ten official accounts. You can learn all the Douyin content by following them:

1. Douyin Store Assistant: Solve the problem of offline merchants attracting traffic
2. Creative Inspiration Assistant: Solve your content creation problems
3. Jianying Assistant: Teach you how to edit and create high-quality video content
4. Massive Classroom: Explanation of operation mechanism and basic analysis knowledge
5. Live Lecture Hall: Explain the rules and operation skills of the live broadcast room
6. E-commerce Assistant: A course to solve e-commerce operation processes and systems
7. Enterprise Account Assistant: Helps Enterprise Accounts solve operational problems and core methods
8. Douxing Intelligence Bureau: Learn the basics of novice operations
9. Tik Tok Creator Learning Center: Learn how to operate short videos and live broadcasts
10. DOU+ Assistant: Core content and tips for becoming popular

3. A violent increase in followers

I started studying Douyin in July. During these three months, I found an interesting phenomenon. There were a number of accounts that gained followers very quickly. One account grew from 0 to 2 million followers within two weeks, and a month later, it suddenly changed its direction to recommending products and started selling them happily. Its followers didn’t drop much. I have to admit that these people have studied Douyin’s recommendation mechanism very thoroughly.

Among the top 11 accounts with the most followers in September, 5 gained followers in this way. The average number of followers gained by each account was 5.1 million in 30 days, or about 200,000 per day on average. This was particularly true in September.

September's fan rankings

Daily fan growth trend chart

The characteristics of these accounts are:

① All videos are film and television clips or commentary, and there are videos for users with different tastes;

②Upload multiple videos every day (10~30);

One account even uploaded 1,984 works in September, an average of one every 20 minutes, which is really outrageous diligence;

What's even more outrageous is that after gaining fans, he started a crazy road of monetization. He took on film and television promotion tasks and earned 300,000 yuan. He taught people how to edit, and each person earned 1,000 to 3,000 yuan. There are already thousands of graduates. In addition, he also made a lot of money from other monetization income such as window display, mini programs, and live broadcasts.

The content of film and television editing does not require creativity, and it is better to standardize the output of videos, which is suitable for team-scale operations. The number of likes for each of their videos is not high, only a few hundred or thousands, and there are few popular videos. The number of fans increases purely by the number of videos, which shows that this human wave tactic is still effective;

If you think about it carefully, you can understand why the number of fans has increased so much. Douyin generally does not recommend multiple videos to the same account to duplicate users, and the exposure of dozens of videos is dozens of times that of other accounts. In addition, the film and television content itself is attractive, so the ability to attract fans is naturally much stronger than other types of accounts. This model is highly replicable, and it is very effective in increasing fans in the early stages. As can be seen from the fact that there are multiple accounts on the list in September, I believe there will be more in October. I just don’t know whether Douyin will restrict such behavior in the future, but the current bonus period is still there.

IV. Conclusion

Some people say that all businesses are worth redoing on Douyin. Now I deeply agree with this. From hobby e-commerce, to local life, to video search, to private domain traffic, and even games and social networking, in Douyin's large traffic pool of only 700 million daily active users, Douyin's business is flourishing everywhere, and it seems that there is no boundary.

In the PC era, there was a saying from Tencent that if you stick a pole in the size of QQ, it will bloom. However, only Tencent itself can enjoy this dividend. It is unwilling to open up its ecosystem. Ordinary entrepreneurs even face direct threats from Tencent's competition.

But the current logic of Douyin is not like that. It has enough scale and is willing to share this dividend with ordinary users. It uses decentralized machine recommendation methods to create a relatively fair platform to give everyone a chance. Douyin’s current scale and opportunities are very similar to Taobao 10 years ago and official accounts 5 years ago. I hope you don’t miss the last chance for short videos.

Author: Zhou Wu

Source: Zhou Wu