Let’s talk about how to operate from the perspective of channel operation

I felt sleepy in the afternoon and wanted to go downstairs to my workplace to smoke a cigarette. When I walked to the first floor, I saw Ximen Qing chatting secretly with a new female colleague in a corner. I felt inexplicably jealous and pretended not to notice.

"Han Li, Han Li, stop pretending, why are you running!" Ximen Qing shouted at me.

I chuckled and said, "You guys are in love, talk, talk!"

"Don't be ridiculous! Come over here and tell Yang Liu about operations !"

Yang Liu is a new operations person who has been here for just a month. After graduation, he worked as a village official in a village near Daxing, Beijing for three years.

"Oh, are you talking about operations?" My eyes lit up, and my jealousy disappeared. I became very excited when I talked about operations.

"We can't talk about operations in secret in some corner. Let's go to the front door. We can smoke and talk openly!"

Walking to the door, I lit a cigarette. "Yang Liu, is there anything difficult to solve?" I knew it clearly.

"I'm almost depressed to death doing these things over and over again every day!" said Yang Liu.

"Who do you want to do these things? These tasks to ensure the normal operation of the product are originally prepared for newcomers. If we let people who have worked for five or six years do these things, do you think the leaders will be willing? You stopped working after just over a month. Where will we put the people who have been running the product for three years?"

I changed my original friendly tone when chatting with Feicui and Chuxia (the article "Girl, You Are Actually Just an Operations Manager") and decided to try a new way of persuasion: I recently learned the "Internet +" strategy, and I decided to change it to "Internet x", magnifying her anger tenfold, and pouring a bucket of oil on her when the flame of her enthusiasm was about to go out.

Yang Liu was obviously unhappy, with tears in her eyes.

I. Typical behavioral characteristics of operators

I ignored her and pointed at her with my eyes wide open: "You don't look like an operator at all. You don't look like an operator in your dress. You dress like someone from the Politburo, and you look like an aristocrat. Aristocrats can't be operators, because operators need to fly close to the ground. If you dress in a high-end and elegant style, you will be like an airplane, flying close to the sky. Look at me, I am unkempt and naked every day. This is how an operator dresses, because only people with popular personality traits can be operators . Menqing has never done this well. He wears a suit and tie every day, and he looks like an insurance or real estate agent."

Ximen Qing: "Brother Li, my surname is Ximen and my given name is Qing!"

"Yeah, I know, Menqing!"

"Also, why did you study for a master's degree? With a higher education, your horizons will be higher. With a higher horizon, you will not want to do the same things over and over again every day. Only people with low education can humble themselves and feel inadequate, because operations require the ability to humble themselves and endure loneliness."

Yang Liu was completely confused by me. I guessed from her expression that no one had ever scolded her so harshly before. I have to give her a sweet treat:

"Of course, there are two points that determine that you are actually a good candidate for operations:

First, you have been a village official, and a village official is an operational position. Village officials emphasize "serving the people" in order to ensure that villagers live in harmony. So although you have been a village official for three years, you have actually had three years of operational experience.

Second, operations are becoming increasingly feminine, and your gender gives you a great advantage. In many companies I have worked for, girls basically make up 80% of the operations department. I also asked some friends and they were generally the same. Why? Because girls are meticulous, and operations is a job that requires attention to details. So you found the right job. ”

Yang Liu's expression eased a little!

2. Operations: Half Channel, Half Product

"So, what is this job I do?"

Yang Liu was arranged to post in the interactive community in the morning to accumulate brand value, and call B-side users to conduct business research in the afternoon!

I renewed my diamond and I became excited when talking about operations. I have been smoking a diamond blue cigarette holder for 6 years, just because the Internet is blue.

"The work you do is typical of channel operations, which is half of an operations position! You took over half of the operations right after you arrived. It seems that the leadership values ​​you very much. Are you a relative of the big boss? No wonder you looked familiar to me the moment I saw you!"

The willows are happy, and their faces are rosy.

"How important are channels? Let me give you an example! In the Internet circle, there are two types of people who live a particularly comfortable life: joke tellers and motivational people. They are good at writing and making jokes. But the secret of their success is not the content, but the channels. No matter how good the content is, it is useless without a strong channel to support it. Later, they became smart and stopped creating original content. Instead, they formed groups to create channels. So when you often browse the 'Discover' channel on Weibo, you will find that there are only a few original jokes every day!"

"Then where do their jokes come from?" Young people are still very keen on jokes.

"They keep an eye on the content shared on the Internet by those who have no channels but are a little smart, and are always ready. As soon as a new article comes out, they immediately make up sentences. The skill they practice is called pseudo-originality. It emphasizes speed. Moreover, each of them has a small library with a huge amount of books. They can pick out a lot of jokes from any book, and then imitate it in wording and sentence making."

"So that's how it is! Brother Nali, you just said that channels are one half of operations, what is the other one?"

"This is a question about the classification of operations positions. Let me first implant a very simple knowledge of operations in your brain! This is very important and will help you understand operations. Operations are half about attracting new users and half about conversion. Attracting new users is channel operations, such as SEO on search platforms, ASO on app stores , and the question-and-answer platforms you are working on now, all of which are about attracting new users. Conversion is product operations , which is about converting the ultimate business goal. Operations are divided into these two categories!"

"That's not right," Ximen Qing was a little confused: "I've read a lot of articles about operations, and they divide operations into very detailed categories! For example, operations are divided into content operations, user operations, data operations, event operations, channel operations... and so on and so forth."

I decided to point out the current situation: "It is very tiring to divide operations into such a small part. This kind of division itself is wrong. You will find that the more detailed the operation is, the higher the cost of mutual coordination and communication. One of the main characteristics of operation is 'quick response'. By the time you have clearly divided the work of an operation project, the hot spot may have passed. I have worked in the operation departments of many companies, and I have never seen such a division of labor. You see, our unit is also a medium-sized Internet company. There is no such clear division of labor. Everyone should work towards an operation goal and work together. If you are good at copywriting, optimize the copywriting part. I am good at path optimization, so I will work on the process. Menqing may be better at persuasion, so I will work on the user persuasion model... Everyone works together on one thing, regardless of job responsibilities, and efficiency will be high!"

Yang Liu was fascinated. He must have discovered that I was not only handsome, but also had excellent conversation skills!

"Then who will do the retention?" This time it was Ximen Qing's turn to be confused!

"Retention is the job of the product manager ! Letting operations do retention is a fairy tale! Menqing, there are three sentences you must remember:

Ximen Qing seemed to be deep in thought, and suddenly something enlightened came to his mind!

"After listening to you talk about operations, I feel that operations require a lot of knowledge! Then why am I so uninterested in it?" Yang Liu looked confused!

It's time to uproot the weeping willows, and I start to use my ultimate moves.

3. Treat everything as an operational project!

"The reason why you feel bored is that you don't treat the work in your hands as an operational project, but as a running project. Routine work is definitely boring! If you can break the conventional thinking and treat your work as an operational project, then the pleasure will come out!

Let me give you an example: there is a traditional company that sells toilets. The usual thinking is to mass-produce toilets, set wholesale prices based on profit expectations, build channels, and then add the channels to their own profit expectations to do retail. They are all selling in large quantities and making money from functionality, but they don't make much. Later, a toilet manufacturer came along who had a strong sense of operations. I guess he was possessed by Steve Jobs. After the toilet was produced, a silent device was added. I wondered in my heart, can I also go the emotional route and not sell the function, but sell it at an emotional price? He visited some people and found out the problems in using existing toilets. Later, he attached an emotional appeal to this toilet. He said that what he was selling was not a toilet, but the happiness of his parents in the second half of their lives. The elderly do not sleep well and will wake up at the slightest noise. Then they cannot fall asleep again and have to sit with their eyes open waiting for dawn. You see, operations require care and attention. It feels like it has come out, but he actually priced it at 30,000 yuan. But he was also afraid that if the price was set so high, no one would pay for it. He planned to find a toilet shop to try it out. You see, trial and error is an essential skill for operation. After trying it, I found that some people actually paid for it. There are so many rich people in China! Then he put the product on the market, pricing it at 30,000 yuan each, which was even more aggressive than Steve Jobs' pricing. You see, by taking the emotional route, business value is maximized, and maximizing business value is the ultimate goal of operations! This boss didn't treat selling toilets as an operating project, but as an operational project.

Running a project is all about conventional thinking, not seeking breakthroughs, but moving forward steadily based on existing experience! So operations managers are actually working on retention, just like product managers. The core keyword of the operation project is "optimization". Optimization means continuous trial and error, continuous trying of new solutions, and finally finding the solution that can maximize business value while minimizing investment, and then rolling it out across the board and eventually finalizing it into a regular operating model.

As for what optimization is, let me give you an example from the advertising industry:

It turned out that an advertising company took an order for a dog food poster. After the posters are designed, they are posted in the community. The first round of ads received a lukewarm response. Customers thought that their advertising campaigns usually had this kind of effect and didn’t take it seriously. But there was a smart guy who had operational ideas. He felt that this poster had a lot of room for improvement. These posters were for people to see, he wondered, could dogs see them too. He did two things that directly attracted the dog:

1. Based on the average height of dogs, he moved the poster to the bottom of the advertising column.
2. He sprayed some bone broth on the poster. Bones are a great way to communicate with dogs.

Soon, the poster attracted a large number of dogs. The residents in the community were all scared, thinking that the dogs might be revolting! Then reporters were also brought in to report on it! The advertising effect is directly maximized!

This is a great example of optimization! The same poster, when treated as an advertising project without the concept of optimization, will have a very different effect when treated as an operational project. The same goes for channels. You should always think about how to maximize business value (attract the most traffic) with the least cost (time cost).

"Then tell me, how should I operate this channel?" Yang Liu also began to admire me.

4. How to do channel operation?

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Why are there so many experts in SEO? They have basically studied all the algorithms and mechanisms of Baidu. So they can make tens of millions of dollars just by relying on SEO. I guess the engineers inside Baidu don’t understand Baidu as well as they do. The same goes for Weibo and WeChat. Whoever can study them thoroughly can succeed.

Therefore, every time you build a platform, you must not just do it blindly. Doing so will not help your business capabilities except for becoming proficient in computer operations. If you don't study the platform mechanism and try to understand the preferences and working style of the operator behind the platform, you are really a glimpse of the Berlin Wall away from operation.

"Then how do I study the person behind this?" Yang Liu asked.

“ Role play ! Imagine this channel as your own. If you were working on this platform, what would you do? So operations require people to experience a variety of positions.

For example, when I was working on a channel, I also saved and posted posts every day like you, thinking that my whole life would be spent doing these two things: 'saving' and 'posting'. I was even more miserable than you at that time. Now you just need to put the brand name out there, but I needed to put out the external links as well. I was worried about it and argued with the forum administrator every day. Later, I started to have some creative ideas. I wonder if I can ask the forum moderator to forward my post! I began to study the characteristics of posting platforms, starting with the content. I found that posts in general forums are not actually user-initiated UGC, but the forum administrators’ own pseudonyms collecting posts from outside. Because most forums are built in discuz, there is a vest switcher in it, which is very useful. In fact, I also post on the forum myself. I studied where they usually look for posts, found their content sources, and then concentrated on posting on these content sources. This is how I prepare bait. After I put a few articles up there, the effect was surprisingly good. The forum moderators took the initiative to transfer them to the forum, and some even pinned them to the top of the forum! You see, it takes little effort to accomplish great things, so later on I focused on “saving” and stopped thinking about the issue of “making money”.

There are some rules for 'accumulating' posts. The better the accumulation, the more people will repost (forward) them.

When I first started blogging, after I had laid out the reprinting channels, I began to wonder if I could become more active. The primary indicators of activity are the average dwell time on the blog and the average number of pages visited. I looked at the GA statistics report and found that the average stay time on the blog is 3 minutes and 36 seconds. I decided to set the goal to 6 minutes.

Then I thought about a question: How to increase the average user stay time to 6 minutes?

I think the length of the article is directly proportional to the average stay time. The reading time for a 2,000-word article and a 4,000-word article is definitely different. If I double the word count of each article, based on the current average stay time of 3 minutes and 36 seconds, meeting the target will be a piece of cake. I get really excited when I think of this, so I try to write long blog posts. In order to ensure that users do not get tired of reading if the article is too long, I also put a lot of effort into the content of the article. For example, give more examples, metaphors, and pictures to make users unable to stop reading. Later, I finally increased the average stay time to 6 minutes, so if you often follow my blog or WeChat, you will see that my articles are all long.

Unexpectedly, writing long articles has brought me many benefits. After a while, I found that the UV was improved a lot. I checked the traffic sources in the GA background and found that many new channels had been added. It suddenly dawned on me, because I used to be an editor and I knew that when an editor reprints an article, they usually only read the beginning and the end. The responsible ones would just take a quick look. This was a loophole. Editors subconsciously believe that a good article has three characteristics: many words, clear structures, and illustrations. As long as these three points are met, the editor will generally transfer it. See, there is also room for optimization in 'accumulating posts'. Of course, that was the era of websites. Now we emphasize fragmented reading, and writing long articles is a bit out of date. ”

5. Operation and operation are separated only by the Berlin Wall

"Brother Li, you are so awesome! The business strategies you mentioned made me suddenly realize something!" Yang Liu was completely convinced by my deception!

"In fact, operations require some tricks, especially for those who are new to the industry. One trick after another can make you interested in operations! In May, a client offered a bounty for recruitment and gave 20,000 yuan in red envelopes. The 20 yuan red envelope was put on the WeChat headline for the first time, but it was not sent out when it was sent out. There must be something wrong if a WeChat account with millions of fans cannot send out 20,000 yuan. I decided to send it out once, and I used an operation trick: I found that the numbers 2 and 8 were surprisingly the same in Chinese running script font. So I changed the 20 yuan in the headline image to Chinese running script font.

With just this little trick, the red envelopes disappeared in 1 minute, which alarmed the WeChat headquarters, and they later banned the article directly! You see, this kind of clickbait-like tactic can be often used by newcomers. It will bring you confidence and cultivate the joy of operation.

In fact, Yang Liu, there is only a Berlin Wall between you and operations. If you can tear it down, you will be in operations. If you can't tear it down, you will be sent back to operations. How to promote it depends entirely on you, outsiders can't help you. You can work hard on each move. Then when I have free time, I'll think about the techniques of achieving great results with little effort. Don’t you also have a B-side research job? I'll teach you a way to achieve great results with little effort. I entered the recruitment field last year, and for a while I really wanted to understand how headhunters operate, so I wanted to find a few headhunters to do research. Normally, I would take the initiative to look for headhunters, but I didn't do what was usual. I went directly to liepin.com to update my resume, and updated it frequently. Headhunters called me every day, and then I chatted with them one by one and became good friends with them. ”

Yang Liu completely convinced me.

"My leader said that I did this for the brand!" Yang Liu blinked!

6. Don’t aim for branding when operating

"Regarding the brand, you have to pretend to obey your boss but actually disobey him, because it's a fantasy to create a brand through a question-and-answer platform with only a few guns and no firepower support. Anyway, the brand cannot be accurately measured, so there is no need to refute the boss. But when you do it yourself, don't take the brand as your goal. The brand is just an excuse for not being able to achieve results. For example, you will definitely hear such words in the future: 'Well, this event didn't bring much high sales, but it was good for brand communication.' These are all nonsense, just listen to them. I used to use the brand as a shield. Later I found that it was too vague. The goal is not clear at all. Taking the brand as the goal has ruined countless good seedlings of operations, because branding is the easiest to breed laziness, which is not good for the growth of operations in the long run. Although everyone is a communication medium now, some people say that you can become famous overnight by communication, and there are successful cases. But more often, if you don't spend a lot of money, don't use tens of thousands of water troops to support, don't find a few KOLs, and only rely on one or two people to post day after day to add value to the brand, it will be a miracle in the operation industry if you really succeed."

So, you still have to aim for the ultimate effect. Let me give you an example: There is a person in the industry who is very good at Weibo marketing . His name is Du Zijian. He is a literary man who had been in prison. Later he became famous by leveraging Weibo and became an expert in Weibo marketing. He once said, "The answer is marketing." What he meant was that when search engines were becoming a national application, he believed that as long as he could get the long-tail words used in search engines, and then use manpower to write the answers to users on Baidu, such as Baidu Knows and Baidu Tieba, he could embed the brand name or other promotional items in the answers, which was very powerful. For example, for cold medicine, no matter users search for “what to do if I have a runny nose”, “what medicine to take for a cold”, “what to do if my child suddenly has a fever”, “what medicine is good for cough relief”…, the shadow of 999 Cold Remedy will appear. This is precision marketing, and the goal is sales. This is exactly the same as the advertising slogan that Melatonin bombards on TV every day. Such a bad slogan is of no help to the brand's reputation, but it is surprisingly good at promoting sales, so Melatonin also aims at sales. This marketing approach is theoretically feasible. But there are two prerequisites: a huge amount of user search terms and a huge amount of answer writing and publishing, which is actually a very costly job. ”

"Okay, I understand. Brother Nali, do I need to learn some technology? I want to sign up for a class to learn front-end." Yang Liu said.

7. What should operations learn?

"Forget about it. You must not learn technology. People who do technology are bald at a young age. Look at our company, there are so many bald technicians. Why are they bald? Because they often encounter logical problems, and when they can't figure it out, they scratch their heads. If they scratch too much, they will become bald. If you still want to be a beauty, don't learn technology."

Yang Liu shuddered and touched his head. He was scared by me!

"If you really want to learn something, you might as well study human nature. These two words contain a lot of knowledge.

The "superiority" of operations lies in the ability to take advantage of human nature. For example, the Programmer Rock Night event held a few days ago. Men Qing didn’t understand rock music at all, but he still went to listen to it excitedly. Why! Because this is a great opportunity to take photos and show off your popularity, and after posting it, you can just wait to get likes. Rock Night satisfies my need for taking photos, but the most important need is to post the photos on WeChat Moments, right? It’s a celebration of the festival. ”

Ximen Qing was almost asleep, because I had fooled him with these words before and they were boring to him!

"Yeah, that's true. When I went to the scene, there were really not many programmers. Almost all of the 400 people didn't understand technology, and they tried every means to take photos with the models."

I secretly gave Ximen Qing a thumbs up with my eyes.

"Yang Liu, you see, I was right! This is human nature. When I was running the website 108 Generals, I invited many great people to give lectures and held offline training activities, which I named "salon". Later, a friend of mine in the fashion circle couldn't stand it and said that your salon was a crappy salon. Look at the salons I held. They were either held in manicure places, coffee shops, or art galleries, and several founders of well-known companies preached. I laughed and was speechless. Salon sounds high-end! I learned this from Master Kong's braised beef noodles. The meat on the outer packaging of braised beef noodles is not that big, so why do users still like to buy it, right! I used the word "salon" and it immediately became more classy, ​​even though it was just a small event. Human nature is born like this.

Didn’t I write an article a few days ago that got over 300,000 views? What is the monthly salary to be considered the top group among those born in the 1980s? I analyzed the background data at that time and found a problem. I found that the number of forwarding times was several times the number of people who forwarded it! I did a role-playing from the perspective of human nature, and finally understood that nowadays a girl has not just one boyfriend, but at least 7! Why? Think about it, this article must have been forwarded mostly by women. Then she did not forward it to WeChat Moments all at once, but shared it with her boyfriends one by one, and added a sharing message: If you want to marry me, you have to work hard! If we analyze it along this line of thought, everything becomes clear. So later when I was selecting topics for WeChat, I would put myself in the role of a forwarder, and think about what my purpose would be if I forwarded this article?

"Haha, Brother Li, how do you know so much?" Yang Liu laughed so hard that her body shook!

"Oh, I often summarize, and I like to practice. I practice at work, and I also do some things when I am alone. I figure it out step by step. In addition, I still need to read more books!"

“Then please recommend me a book.”

"Jin Ping Mei," I blurted out, "This book can be called a great book in the operation world. Although it is not about operation, it is full of operation examples. For example, the details are described very well, the human nature is also vividly expressed, and the copywriting is even better... It is definitely a rare operation secret book. You can read it as a martial arts novel or as an operation book!"

"Get lost!"

Ximen Qing and Yang Liu rushed away!

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