Let’s talk about how to recommend and promote good products on Zhihu in 2021!

This article mainly explains the Red Ocean strategy, that is, how to divide your own cake in the high-traffic Red Ocean battlefield. The author's practical direction is the hot topic of "Christmas gifts" a while ago, which lasted for about a week. First let me give you a brief overview of the battle situation:

The author wrote a total of 3 answers and one article based on "Christmas Gifts".

The revenue is mainly divided into two parts:

1. Revenue generated by promoting products on JD.com

2. Merchant Subsidies

1. Revenue generated by promoting products on JD.com

The above picture shows the GMV brought by 1 article and 3 answers through the red ocean strategy during the Christmas peak period, totaling: 60,572.7 yuan.

Let's break it down one by one:

The main traffic source for this article is active search on Zhihu, and the conversion rate is also the highest. Zhihu traffic is divided into: active search and passive recommendation. Active search demand is more obvious, so the conversion rate is higher than passive recommendation. This area is also the author's main research direction in 2021.

The other answers basically all slowly declined from the peak of writing, and the author also made an analysis of this. First look at the data graph

These three questions mainly come from Zhihu's hot list recommendations. The answer to "Christmas is coming, what to give my girlfriend?" ranked first on the question the next day after I wrote it. Question search + content distribution gave me a huge amount of accurate traffic, but because of this, the competition was too fierce, resulting in "malicious opposition" by peers, causing the ranking to drop sharply and traffic to decline. All these answers and articles operated by the author rely on the content of the article, and improve the ranking by optimizing the details of the article and studying the Zhihu sorting rules. Judging from the test done by the author on the "Christmas Gifts" hot spot this time, writing a high-quality article is more valuable than a large number of answers.

One more thing:

Some of JD.com's merchants are extremely unethical! I strongly condemn them. I hope everyone will keep their eyes open when choosing products and merchants. If you find any tricks, you will terminate the cooperation for life! Here are the problems the author encountered during this period:

1. Coupon expiration (many JD merchants use high-priced coupons to attract us to promote, and it is common to close the coupons when sales go up. When you find that the conversion rate is getting lower, you need to check the problem of product coupons)

2. Changes in commission ratio (this is even more disgusting than the above. The author has encountered several products where the commission ratio was lowered. Please see the picture below!)

The initial price of the product was 189 yuan with a commission of 12%. After sales increased, the price was changed to 179 yuan and the commission was changed to 2%! A full 10 percentage points.

2. Merchant subsidies

I don't want to talk about this myself, because it involves the author's current project, including this aspect is definitely a major trend in 2021, and the real place to make money is here. After thinking about it, everyone has had a hard time in 2020, and it also happens to be the end of the year, so just treat it as a benefit for everyone.

1. Why is the author so confident that this is a major trend?

I wonder if everyone who sees this article has ever promoted products on Tik Tok. Books that cost 7 or 8 yuan with free shipping on a certain platform now cost 40 to 50 yuan on Tik Tok. I wonder if you still remember books like Guiguzi, The Way of the Wolf, Three Wonders, The Words of the Old Man, etc. Today, the author will give a complete analysis.

Why are the books that users buy so expensive on a certain audio platform? In fact, the money is not earned by the merchants, but by the video creators. The platform's commission ratio of 30% to 50% is the obvious income. When your video goes viral, merchants will contact you and use their products in future videos. The advantage is: offline subsidies. After all the subsidies are paid, the money earned by the merchants is actually the same as that of a certain audio platform. The money is actually earned by us content creators~

As long as there is enough capital, everything can be negotiated. The above picture initially said settlement would be made on a weekly basis, but after communication it became daily settlement. The offline rebates are all brought by a video. Excluding the money settled by the Douyin platform, the total income is about 20,000 yuan, and the total time taken to make the video is 5 minutes.

Getting back to the topic, Zhihu now has such an opportunity. Please see the following figure:

So where are the opportunities? Generally, your answers or articles that actively contact you have high exposure. Our opportunities to make money are divided into two directions:

1. Insert the product into their product and help them sell the product to earn commission. Those who actively contact you will be given a directional link, that is, the commission rate for ordinary people is 5%, and it may be 20-30%. The commission rate varies according to the product and category.

2. Collect promotion fees. You can ask the brand to charge a certain amount of promotion fees based on your article reading data. N good product cards can be inserted in one answer. In theory, we can collect promotion fees from N merchants, such as how much the price is for the top three or top five. The price of the key recommendations is up to you to reflect on yourself~

Also, if you are in the beauty field, then you will have countless cosmetics and skin care products in the next few years. Those who have worked on Douyin know that the brand will actively send you a large number of samples of new products for you to review. It is free to mail them, and you don’t have to return them after the review~~ So can these reviewed products be sold on Xianyu? Xianyu will tell you when there is a chance that placing orders on Xianyu is actually very simple!

In addition, there are many brands that are not sincere about cooperation, and we need to identify them:

The author has encountered this before. They need to upload the product and provide an Alipay account. They promise to pay the promotion fee within 2 weeks and say that they will submit the financial transfer. The way to deal with such authors is to block them directly. Let's be realistic: if you don't see the rabbit, don't release the eagle. Why should you link to them if they don't transfer the money (unless the commission ratio is attractive and the product is really good). When a large number of brands actively look for you, then we need to have absolute initiative!

Recently, I have had in-depth communication with several brands and are preparing for in-depth cooperation after the new year. It is for this reason that this article has been delayed until now.

How to create good articles on Zhihu

Let's get back to the point. Now that we understand how Zhihu makes money, the key is how we can write high-quality and traffic-rich Zhihu articles!

How did I write just one article about good things and successfully optimize it to the top three in search rankings?

Step 1: Choose the field you are best at, such as beauty, mobile phone reviews, home appliances, etc. The title is the most important part of the entire article. If you write a good title, the traffic will not be bad!

A good title must contain the most basic words such as "core words", "related words", "adjectives", etc. When selecting products, you can analyze whether the keyword is worth doing through Baidu Index, 5118, Zhihu drop-down box, related searches, etc.

1. Baidu Index mobile search more than 1000 (unless the commission for a single product is high, otherwise it is not recommended)

2. Zhihu drop-down boxes, related searches, and other words that contain strong shopping needs, such as: recommendation, top ten rankings, brand, how to choose, how to buy, affordable, evaluation, pitfall avoidance guide, etc.

Let’s take “Bluetooth headset” as an example.

Baidu mobile index is 1500, which meets our requirements

The Zhihu drop-down box and search both contain words related to shopping needs, proving that people searching for this keyword on Zhihu have a need to buy.

After determining the product and core keywords, we need to write the title like this:

1. Under the premise of ensuring the fluency of the title, do not pile up keywords. Use Zhihu drop-down and related searches to expand related keywords. We can list the related keywords of Bluetooth headsets as:

Bluetooth headset recommendation, Bluetooth headset recommendation for students, Bluetooth headset recommendation under 100, Bluetooth headset wireless, Bluetooth headset recommendation affordable, Bluetooth headset recommendation under 200, Bluetooth headset recommendation evaluation, Bluetooth headset recommendation sound quality ranking

Among them, the word recommendation of Bluetooth headset appears most frequently, which can be rewritten as follows:

2021 Bluetooth headset evaluation and recommendation for students, purchase guide within 100-200 yuan, top ten Bluetooth headset sound quality ranking list, which ones are good and worth buying?

After knowing the word segmentation algorithm, we can include the above-mentioned related keywords. These are the most basic word segmentation theories of search engines. I will not go into details here. Friends who are interested can Baidu "word segmentation algorithm", which is also applicable to Zhihu~

Remember: do not use keyword stacking, extreme words, or illegal words (you can use Baidu "Juyi.com" to check)

The first picture is also very important and needs to be attractive. Before users click on an article, the first thing they see is often the "title" and "first picture". If you do these two things well, when you are recommended internally on Zhihu, your click-through rate will be greatly increased while the exposure rate is the same. This is the same logic as the first picture of e-commerce.

After writing the title, we start writing the content:

1. Do not copy any articles. Zhihu will strictly check! It must be original.

2. The first line contains core keywords, related keywords, etc.

3. When writing an article, it should be at least 800 words, and pictures + videos should be included as much as possible. Pictures must be annotated!!!

4. Refer to the search engine's "tf-idf" algorithm to make the keyword frequency in the article as evenly distributed as possible. The keyword density should be controlled at around 5%-8%, and all relevant keywords should be distributed in a segmented manner.

5. After the first line, you need to write an outline to explain what your article contains. Depending on different needs, you can write:

Recommended Bluetooth headsets under 100 yuan

Recommended Bluetooth headsets under 200 yuan

Recommended Bluetooth Headsets for Boys

Recommended Bluetooth Headsets for Girls

And so on, try to meet the needs of all incoming users as much as possible based on the user attributes of the keywords. You can refer to tools such as Zhihu drop-down, Zhihu related searches, and Baidu Index’s demand map.

List as many brands as possible. Compare at multiple price points. Write about one product that you are promoting. Write as much detail as possible about its parameters, pros and cons, etc. You can base the specific data on your own understanding of the product, or search on Baidu. You can refer to product reviews for the pros and cons. Research the most concerned questions of the product in the "Ask Everyone" section and list them in the article in advance.

After writing the article, we need to check whether it has been included in the Zhihu index. If it is included in the index, we will carry out in-site promotion and other operations. If it is not included in the index, please modify the title first.

Search for questions related to Bluetooth headsets and guide vertically relevant users to read our articles. This can enhance exposure and make it easier for our articles to be recommended on Zhihu, thereby obtaining greater traffic.

Zhihu is a content-heavy platform. Content is the first factor in everything, and articles are updated with the goal of meeting all user needs as much as possible.

Zhihu has a certain timeliness recommendation attribute. We need to modify the article from time to time to optimize the timeliness. The purpose of distributing the article to the relevant questions and answers is to let the machine learn by itself so as to know your account label. The verticality of Zhihu account label is equally important!

Now the Zhihu platform has passed the period of wild growth. Without the unhealthy trend of large quantities of hu likes and shua likes, real passive income has just begun. The Zhihu platform itself is extremely authoritative. Zhihu's traffic includes its own traffic + search engine traffic, and some keywords are also connected to the traffic of WeChat searches, so there is no shortage of traffic. When everyone is scrambling to get to the Q&A site with strong traffic, we maintain the article traffic and find another shortcut to successfully reach the top.

Zhihu's Q&A traffic is equivalent to search engine rankings. There are a large number of peers competing fiercely, and it tends to be public domain traffic, so it is difficult to retain it!

Zhihu’s article traffic is equivalent to WeChat Moments, which is biased towards private domain traffic. Once it comes, it’s yours. How should you choose?

In addition, as for the revenue from Zhihu videos, the author was fortunate to be visited by the operations staff of the Zhihu video team and was invited to join the "Zhihu Campus Video Blogger Exchange Group". Due to limited energy, the focus is not on this for the time being. If I have time next year and have some achievements in the revenue from Zhihu videos, I will continue to share with you.

Currently available for sharing:

1. Zhihu's official operations will proactively contact and provide traffic support for high-quality videos.

2. The communication group mainly connects traffic support + high-quality video analysis + official internal benefits, etc.

This sharing ends here. If you think this article is helpful to you, please give it a thumbs up to support it.

Author: Jiahang

Source: Lu Songsong's blog