Practical methods for obtaining effective trafficfor early Internet startupsIn fact, to become an excellent operator , very high comprehensive ability requirements are required. But who says this isn’t a good thing? If anyone can do a job casually, what is the value of this job?Mr. Wang Hua, Managing Partner of Sinovation VenturesSomeone once lamented: "If you can make an appointment with Mr. Wang Hua, it will be a very happy thing, because he is very willing to share. Once he opens his mouth, he will chatter non-stop, and a lot of dry goods will come to you." Indeed, this "IT geek" not only has a deep understanding of the laws behind the development of the Internet, but also has an MBA degree from Stanford University in the United States. He started his own business successfully in his early 20s, and then worked for Google China. Later, he co-founded Innovation Works with Mr. Kai-Fu Lee . His investment cases include excellent companies such as Zhihu, Wandoujia , and Umeng .What I want to share today is Mr. Wang Hua’s thoughts on how Internet startups can effectively obtain traffic. The article contains a lot of his methodologies and constructive opinions. The content is a bit long, but for entrepreneurs who are worried about obtaining traffic, I believe this will be a good medicine.1 Two Misunderstandings about TrafficRecently, I have encountered some entrepreneurs asking me questions about traffic, so I will use this article to share with you my systematic understanding of this issue.First, why do we need to generate traffic?Entrepreneurs need to understand that generating traffic and users is not a one-time thing; it must be a mobile, persistent, and long-term process.In addition, generating traffic is essentially about generating users and creating products. This is not something that can be automatically solved by hiring a few kids, spending money on advertising, or hiring a few business operations people. Essentially, the CEO and product manager need to think for themselves, but there are actually many misunderstandings here.One of the misunderstandings is to simplify the indicators. Internet companies back then, whether they were video sites or financial sites, often put popular titles such as breast enhancement and naked women in their ad networks to direct traffic to their own websites. They have invested a lot to improve their website's recent operating indicators.But will this really bring about substantial results? The principle sounds simple, but it is very easy to forget when it comes to execution. In fact, 80% or even 90% of the money spent on Internet promotion, including the promotion of group buying websites in the early years, is meaningless.The second misunderstanding is ignoring the product. Products, user acquisition and operations are actually a trinity. Many founders who come from a product background believe that as long as the product itself is well done, the promotion will be easy. Generating traffic is actually about how the product reaches users. This is as important as the product itself and is also a product issue.For example, Zynga’s early games were actually no different from previous ones, but its first batch of seed users were acquired from Facebook. The new method of reaching users itself was a huge innovation.2. User Self-Growth PointSecond, when should we start spending money to acquire users?Most of the methods to generate traffic don’t actually cost any money. Relying on the performance and operation of your own products to gain users is a legitimate way to obtain users, but why spend money to gain users? There may be two answers: first, to accelerate growth; second, seed users are needed.Both of these are reasonable answers. There are two situations in the actual operation process. One is that when the users you acquire can make money and the returns are greater than the cost, you can spend unlimited money to acquire users, there is no doubt about it. Many online games are like this.But if you’re losing money acquiring users, your goal should be to reach a point of organic growth. According to Internet habits, when a brand or user group reaches a certain density, it can then achieve a certain degree of self-growth.If the situation is not particularly chaotic, the number of real users and active users reaches millions, or the word of mouth reaches a certain level, plus the real reputation, the real search index can exceed ten thousand, and the product itself is good, then self-growth can be achieved. The purpose of user growth is to reach this self-growth point as quickly as possible.If this is the case, the purpose is actually very clear. You need to figure out what that point is? What are the real indicators needed to reach that point?If all the promotion you do helps you reach that point, then it is effective; if it does not help you reach that point, for example, a financial portal found some pictures of naked women and put them on the Internet to attract clicks. Although the indicator was achieved, it actually did not help you accumulate real indicators to reach that point. It was completely in vain.3 Three "relative truths" about traffic generationAfter sorting out the most basic concepts, the next thing is to present some relative truths that I have summarized over the years.The first relative truth is that the total traffic you can obtain in any specific method and specific channel is limited, and the more you want to obtain, the more expensive it is and the higher the cost.Whether it is a portal, search engine or other, there are only so many total users who meet your goals. Take search engines as an example. There are the most suitable and cheapest keywords for you. For example, if you invest in a keyword and the search traffic is only 5,000 per day, these are the cheapest to obtain.But if you want to get 10,000 traffics a day, then for the second 5,000 traffics you should look for keywords with lower overlap with you, but with a lower match ratio with your users, which may result in a higher auction price and worse results. In short, if you want to get another 5,000 traffic, it will be even worse.This leads to two phenomena:
You must have a very clear understanding of how to obtain traffic;
Your channels for acquiring traffic must be diversified;
The second relative truth is that all traffic is divided into general and dedicated types. You get the traffic you need from a variety of user entrances, which can be free or paid, but there is a price to pay.Any traffic that only you can use, but is inconvenient for others to use or is useless to others, is actually the cheaper the traffic. Anything that is useful to everyone and can be used by everyone to guide their own users is very expensive traffic.For example, whoever puts it on the homepage of hao123 will be useful to it, and such a position is very expensive. But in the early years, novel websites were very cheap. For only 5,000 yuan a month, you could subscribe to a key position on a novel website with tens of millions of traffic. Because in that era, no matter what kind of advertising or promotion was done with that traffic, it was useless. But that traffic was later very useful in promoting web games.The third relative truth is that any traffic method is not effective in the long run. There is a short window period and a decline period, and those who discover the best way to mine a certain traffic first will benefit the most.This approach will quickly reach a very high price and then gradually decline.For example, when I was at Google in the early years, it was very cheap to obtain Internet cafe traffic in 2006. First, no one gets it, and second, no one knows how to earn back the traffic from Internet cafes. Many people not only don’t know the price, they also don’t know the method. Including in 2003, the first wave of webmasters who knew how to do search engine optimization, those who used it best had a big advantage.However, the user entrance is constantly changing, and the rules and methods of user entrance itself are also constantly changing. Therefore, generating traffic and users is not a one-time thing; it must be a mobile, persistent, and long-term process.Every month some methods go from being very cost-effective to being average, some are even replaced, and then some new channels and methods emerge. For example, Tencent opened the WeChat interface, Apple released a new version, and so on. I have to think about how any change is related to me.4 Identify valid usersSo how do we do it?1) Who is the valid user?What is the first thing to consider when generating traffic? User base. At this stage, what kind of people do you want to use your product is often something that many people don’t think clearly about before they start to increase traffic. There are three important reasons for this question:First of all, it depends on the stage of your product;Pinterest was relatively stable in its early stages of development, so it did not develop so-called grassroots users when developing users in the early stages; nor did it develop its later main user group - middle-aged women in the United States.The first users he focused on developing were photographers. Because it is about sharing beautiful photos with everyone, if you want to attract real core users, you must first have very good content. If a bunch of middle-aged women were to enter at the beginning without a good photographer as the core, the purpose of the product would be ruined. At every stage of traffic promotion, there must first be a product purpose and a user purpose.Density is required for users to reach the tipping point and self-growth point;If you spend money to buy 1,000 users, and assuming that 100 of them are from different circles, then each user group will only have 10 users. This cannot create a tipping point or self-growth point in any user group. And if these 1,000 people are in the same user group, such as a circle or a school organization, at least this promotion can achieve self-growth in this circle.After a period of time, 1,000 people will be reduced to 800, but after a core is formed, these 800 people will become 1,000 or even 1,200 after a period of time. Otherwise, after the promotion fees for these 1,000 people are spent, nothing will be retained after a few days because the crowd density is too small. Even if the quantity is the same, 1,000, there will be a big difference.Another very important reason is media selection;The properties of each media vary greatly, and so do the prices. What criteria do you use to select media? Is it based on the unit price of the media? Or is it based on the total traffic of the media? There is no comparison. None of these things are important. The most important thing is the so-called effective traffic, or effective cost-effectiveness, including effective user behavior.What do you want users to do?You need to think clearly about who your users are and what you want them to do. For example, if you are a website that sells high-end luxury goods, and you put ads on Tieba and hao123, it's not that you don't have users, but that when you spend money to buy 10,000 traffic, maybe only 10 of them are related to you, and among these 10 people, maybe only one is thinking about things related to you when visiting this website.Because even if those 9 people are relevant people, what they do on this website may cause them to not think about what you are promoting at all.5 Prerequisites for product promotion2) What if you want to promote your product? There are several steps to do here.The product itself is worth promoting to these users;You have conducted tests on existing users to ensure that the performance parameters of your product in all aspects for the target users you want to promote to are good enough.Your product must be marketable;Promotion means that you spend money to buy a position from others, or buy the opportunity for users to reach you. Users will only give you 10 seconds, and your product should be clear, concise and unambiguous, so that users can be interested in exploring your product within 10 seconds and be willing to use your product again within the next 3 minutes.And you need to find a way to continue contacting this user within a week and find a way to get the user to come back. This is a basic concept, it's ten seconds, three minutes and a week.You need to have some basic tracking codes, whether it is software or website, you can accurately locate users coming from different channels, and know the differences between users from different channels, the differences in effects, and how they differ from other users.If you don't have this awareness, promotion is a waste of money.6 Specific steps for product promotionNow that the prerequisites for promotion have been met, I will share the specific steps of promotion.The first thing is the choice of media;There are many such practices, and the front-end operations are different for each media and each method. For example, for search engines, what keywords do you buy if you spend money, and how do you do SEO without spending money? How to make your own pages appear in more search results is a general principle.The second step is the landing page. For web pages, it is relatively simple. It means that the terminal page must jump successfully after clicking the ad.This ensures that your landing page is fast enough and has very high compatibility. No matter what browser or network speed is used, it must be successfully implemented within a few seconds.Taking the website as an example, even if the company cannot afford to rent the best server for all other servers, this server must be placed in the best computer room. If other pages use a lot of dynamic and large images, this landing page can make it a static page or a very small page so that it can be opened very quickly.If it is a client, it will first jump to a download location to allow the user to download successfully. If the user has not enabled permission to download from third-party sources on this website, the download may fail. Therefore, there must be clear prompts during the downloading process to help him solve the problem. Even if the download is successful, the user may forget about it. How to improve the download success rate and how to get users to activate and open it are very important steps.The third step is a conversion of the user;There are many issues involved here, such as what impression your product should leave on users within 10 seconds. First of all, can you describe clearly what your product does in a sentence of no more than 10 words? Or your product has many functions, but at this stage of promotion you know very clearly which user group the product wants to attract and what you want users to do.YY can essentially do a lot of things, but it is very specific in a specific promotion stage. For example, when YY promoted a private group in Baidu Tieba, the characteristics of the product were weakened to "there are countless places to listen to music here."The best part is that you can understand what the product does as a whole in just one sentence. If you can't do this, at least you need to understand what the product is used for for this customer group. If you don't understand this, it will be difficult to achieve good results.There is another fundamental reason. In theory, the users you attract through promotion are those who have no idea about you and do not know your products. And there is a great possibility that he is a user who has used many products, and may even have used your competitor's products. So why would he switch to you?Therefore, these 10 words should not only state the benefits your product brings to him, but also tell him clearly how you can help him accomplish this task and in what respects you are much better than others.Unless you are the first to implement this feature and there is a strong demand for this feature. For example, when Talkbox was first promoted, it only needed to say "I provide free intercom" because no other mobile phone software in the world had this function at that time.But Voxer, which was released some time ago, must emphasize "multiple parties can speak at the same time" if it wants to do this, because you are not the first person to do this. So in the 10-word description, you have to figure out what these people are doing here and what their outstanding advantages are.Also, the essential purpose of this page is to let users understand what you do and what your advantages are within ten seconds. If you are lucky, the product itself has a ready-made page that can meet the user's needs, but in 99% of cases, this page must be made separately.First, leave an impression on users within 10 seconds. Second, jump to a deeper understanding and exploration of the product for users, or users are willing to have a deeper interaction. You need to design all the entrances well. If the user is willing to continue watching after 10 seconds, you should give him a guided tour. This time should not be too high, you can set it to 3 minutes.What do you want users to do in these 3 minutes? There are many possibilities, because everyone has different goals and therefore approaches are also different. Some may want to further deepen the user's impression, while others may want to show users some of the website's content. In addition to making an impression on the product for some users, you also need to let a small number of users leave something behind so that you can actively find them in the future.The next step is a more important process, which is to treat a user’s first visit and the following two weeks as an online RPG upgrade game. The user has a preliminary understanding of you, and you also know how to contact him. If the user visits the website for the second or third time within two weeks, you should gradually deepen his impression and show him more functions, gradually increase the user's favorability towards you, and ensure that the user can visit again after two weeks. The user import process is very detailed.Social games and even traditional client-based online games often put a lot of effort into this aspect. Because this is a matter of life and death for them, and they can see the money immediately. But for products that don’t make money, there are no hard indicators behind them, so this process is often ignored.Those games rarely show all the functions to users when they play for the first time or at the first level, nor do they force users to make friends at the first level. They set users on a growth curve and provide users with certain functions within a few days or at certain stages. This is very clear.From the second conversion to the third conversion, to the three-day retention, to the seven-day retention, and even to the two-week retention, if there is a difference of just a few percent in each link, the final result will be several times different. Complete retention not only requires a clear understanding of the product and users, but also requires the involvement of detailed operations, planning, and product development teams.7 Social PromotionLet me briefly talk about the socialization of products.Whether in the United States or China, whether in traditional application fields, social fields, or e-commerce fields, a phenomenon has emerged: dozens or even a dozen people can achieve 10 million users in a very short period of time, and can achieve very high growth, providing high value to users. There are many examples of this kind.This involves several issues. What is socialization?Internal social operation and social design of the product, and external social promotion of the product. If we want to achieve this level, content and services will be generated by users, and the promotion and secondary dissemination of these products will also be achieved through social methods.Only by letting your users become your authors, transaction regulators, and marketers can you develop at a very high speed with only a dozen or twenty people.Even if you cannot do this, there is always a link that can make it happen, for example, the product itself is not socialized, but the promotion method is socialized.
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