Zhihu promotion plan and operation model

Zhihu is currently the largest community platform in China, and is one of the best in terms of content and user scale. In addition, Zhihu itself is invested by Baidu, and Zhihu's high-quality content has a very high recommendation priority in Baidu. Therefore, combining the long-tail effect of Zhihu's content to attract traffic and acquire customers is really effective.

Regarding Zhihu operations , they are inseparable from the following 8 parts:

I will pick out a few key points below to explain in detail. You can also quickly understand today's content through the following directory:

Table of contents:

• Thoroughly understand Zhihu's operating model
• Systematic Zhihu operation skills
• Accelerate exposure and conversion with Zhi+

1. Thoroughly understand Zhihu’s operating model

If you want to do a good job in attracting traffic to Zhihu, you must first understand Zhihu's operating model. In fact, Zhihu's operation can be simply divided into three aspects: content screening, content creation, and attracting traffic to Zhihu:

1. Content screening

In the operation of Zhihu, content is definitely indispensable, but the prerequisite is to do a good job of content screening.

1) What makes a good question?

A good question is one that is relevant to your field, has high exposure and is highly topical.

2) How to select good questions?

• Follow up on Zhihu’s current bonuses: hot lists and videos.
• Some highly-watched vertical topics.
• Questions that rank high for certain keywords.

3) Tips for screening questions

• Question attention: The higher the number of followers, the greater the traffic. It is recommended that >500 people follow it.
• Number of answers: The more answers there are, the harder it is for new answers to compete for the top spot. It is recommended to keep the number of answers to less than 500.
• Precision problem: better results and higher conversion rate.
• Long-term issues: have long-term discussion value and long-tail traffic.
• On-site search: The higher the keyword search ranking, the greater the long-tail traffic.
• Topic index: Questions included in the topic index have greater long-tail traffic.

2. Content Creation

Content creation requires the ability to produce high-quality content and maintain a certain update frequency. In addition to increasing the account weight, it can also continuously increase the brand's exposure. When a certain amount is accumulated, the effect of attracting customers will undergo a qualitative change.

3. Drain traffic and acquire customers

There are many ways to attract traffic to Zhihu. You can pay for it directly or for free. The paid methods mainly include Zhi+ and information flow. The free methods include dry goods traffic, welfare traffic, introduction page traffic, end-of-article traffic and other methods.

Take “Zhi+” as an example:

Zhi+ is a content service solution that best fits the Zhihu content ecosystem and platform value for both enterprises and individual users, providing tools and services for the entire chain from content production to content distribution to content interaction.

2. Systematic Zhihu operation skills

1. On-site promotion

① Do a good job in account field positioning and improve account basic information

Accounts should try to position themselves in vertical niches, which will help accumulate weight and increase recommendations under the topic, while also conveying their value to users.

The basic information should also be improved. Based on the account positioning, detailed descriptions can be added:

One sentence introduction: Try to set up the conversion point to attract users' continued attention.
Personal profile: It is the second traffic entrance to attract users. You can edit it in more detail to guide and convert these users again.
Cover: The cover should be displayed in a beautiful way on mobile and PC.

② Increase salt value and get more content recommendation opportunities

The Zhihu community regards all content and professional sharing generated by users on Zhihu as the salt of wisdom extracted from the ocean of knowledge. The salt value is your value in the salt ocean of Zhihu. However, the salt value distribution range of Zhihu is between 0 – 1000. The higher the salt value, the more professional and credible it represents. The higher the salt value, the more priority the Zhihu system platform will give to your articles, answers, etc., so that you will get more opportunities for self-recommendation.

③Continuously provide valuable content

Content is one aspect that Zhihu users are interested in. We should regularly update content in our own field, try to use objective descriptions, be detailed, and avoid inflammatory remarks. At the same time, the content should be serious, profound, positive and uplifting, and can generate knowledge and help other friends.

Framework of high-quality content: well-reasoned and engaging.

▪ Provide practical information: state the conclusion + list the points in sections + case materials + summarize and sublimate ▪ Make sense: create a crisis (question the mainstream answer, question common sense, preset anxious scenarios) + deep resonance (evoke trust) + solve problems (practical suggestions) ▪ Tell a story: beginning (protagonist) → development (small scenes/stories) → climax (contradiction, suspense) → ending (drama/contrast, strong ending/leaving people wanting more) ▪ Be clever: Although knowledge-oriented, the content is entertaining and deeply rooted in people's hearts. You can write serious gossip, make unexpected jokes, or write psychological contrasts that break the conventions.

In addition, pay attention to the interaction between the attractiveness of the opening and the introduction at the end.

④ Improve the ranking of content on the site and get more exposure (it is best to get the first likes in batches)

The ranking and likes within Zhihu can benefit the operation effect of Zhihu. Especially if you can get the first likes in batches, your exposure and weight will be greatly improved, which will play a vital role in attracting traffic and acquiring customers.

In fact, whether it is on a search engine platform or on Zhihu, generally speaking, the higher the ranking, the more traffic it brings. Take the Q&A on Zhihu as an example, the traffic difference between the first and fifth place may be 5 times or even higher.

⑤ Cooperate with appropriate users to interact and guide them to like or add followers

Your friends are your boosters in Zhihu operations and promotions, so you can interact more with users through the comment section, or you can guide likes or followers by sharing vertical content in your field.

2. Off-site promotion

①Build a keyword library to intercept more Baidu search rankings

Regardless of which platform, you can build a keyword library based on users' search habits and capture more Baidu search rankings. After all, Baidu displays up to 240 million words of content on Zhihu every day, with up to 12 million clicks, so the high-quality content output on Zhihu can also help you harvest off-site traffic.

② Give priority to Zhihu long-term questions that are already ranked high in Baidu to ensure a steady flow of traffic

No matter how old the content is, as long as you can rank high, it will always be searchable by users. Therefore, you can give priority to promoting Zhihu's long-term questions that are already ranked high in Baidu, so as to ensure uninterrupted traffic.

Take "weight loss" as an example and search with 5118:

③Do a good job of SEO optimization to improve search rankings

By mining and analyzing users’ search habits and needs, we can find keywords with high search volume and high conversion rate in the established keyword library and optimize them to improve ranking and increase exposure. What I just mentioned above is improving the on-site ranking. If you have the technology and can also improve the off-site SEO search ranking of this issue, that would be amazing.

If that doesn't work, just choose some questions that already have good rankings.

3. Accelerate exposure and conversion with Zhi+

Zhi+ is a paid traffic monetization tool provided by Zhihu officials for individuals and enterprises. It can embed conversion plug-ins in articles to attract traffic, increase exposure, and achieve accurate traffic conversion.

This type of fan base has a high level of trust in the source, and it supports multiple paths, effectively shortens conversion links, efficiently enables content creation, helps maximize content value, and provides all-round content cooperation support for businesses and individuals.

It can also be understood as if you publish an article on Zhihu, your article will be seen by more people through Zhi+, and it can also help you turn users into real leads, with higher user acceptance and better results. Therefore, with the help of Zhi+, advertisers can solve problems such as attracting customers and realizing product monetization.

1. Use knowledge + self-selection

Zhi+Zixuan can target clients who are starting from scratch and advertisers who do not have a content team, helping them to quickly advance from 0 to 1. For clients who have content, it can enrich the product content from multiple styles and angles to make it more attractive to users.

2. Knowing + mutual selection

As we all know, Zhihu focuses on high-quality content, so we can use Zhi+ to select existing high-quality content, comprehensively evaluate the relevance of the content to our own products, and use Zhi+ after implantation/modification to accelerate efficiency and achieve the expected promotion effect.

Related articles:

Analysis of Zhihu promotion methods

Zhihu Promotion and Traffic Draining Strategy

How to promote traffic and acquire customers on Zhihu

How to quickly familiarize yourself with the promotion rules of Douyin and Zhihu?