Zhihu Operation: How to receive 10,000 yuan in advertising fees for one answer on Zhihu

On Zhihu, I earned 10,000 yuan in advertising fees by answering one answer, and at the same time brought in 6,000+ Zhihu fans in the entrepreneurial field. And in this process, figure out the following three things:

1. How to play Zhi+HuXuan?

2. How do creators earn advertising fees through Zhi+HuXin?

3. How do advertisers obtain traffic through Zhi+Huxuan?

Below is a screenshot of Zhi+Huxuan’s advertising fees:

Today, through this article, I will share the whole process and the experience I gained in actual combat, hoping it will be helpful to everyone.

Here's what happened. I published an answer in the field of entrepreneurship in September, and it went viral a week later, with the exposure reaching 26,000 per day.

After the first wave of outbreak, traffic dropped sharply and began to decline in about a week.

At this time, I collected the pain points in the comment section and updated it by more than 8,000 words to regain the traffic. By mid-October, the traffic had rebounded significantly.

As of now, this answer has more than 8,000 likes and more than 650 comments, with the highest number of likes in the comment section exceeding 100.

One of the author’s Zhihu accounts quickly gained over 10,000 followers from 2K entrepreneurial followers.

In November, I received a private message notification from Zhihu’s business manager about Zhi+Huxuan. In fact, I knew about Zhi+Huxuan in May, but I always studied the advertising methods from the perspective of an advertiser, and never thought about taking orders and making money as a creator.

In the spirit of practice being the only criterion for testing truth, I went through the entire order-taking process to accumulate front-line combat experience for the subsequent knowledge+ delivery.

It has been proved that by taking orders and gaining some experience from the creator's perspective, I have a clearer judgment on how to place Zhi+Huxuan advertisements.

The following is the main content of my sharing this time. As usual, here is the outline of the full text:

1. What is Zhi+Human Selection?

2. Advertisers’ Delivery Process

3. Tips for advertisers to select and place orders

4. Creator's order acceptance process

5. How can I make my content more easily selected for delivery?

6. How to maximize advertising revenue?

1. What is Zhi+Human Selection?

The official explanation is:

Insert task information into existing high-quality answers/articles in the community and use Zhi+ to promote them.

Let me give you another example so you can understand:

Suppose you are a senior practitioner in the electrical appliance industry and have published a high-quality content in the electrical appliance field on Zhihu, with good data in all aspects.

At this time, a brand of electrical appliances wants to build its own brand influence, and very much believes that your views are in line with their brand concept, and hopes to mention their brand information in the article.

The content may be articles published by the official website, official public account, and institutional account, etc., and you will be paid a fee for this.

And you also agree with his brand and accept their placement request, and a cooperation is achieved.

The detailed process is as follows:

Because your content is of high quality and has a certain influence in this field, the audience also believes in your suggestions, the conversion effect is very good, and ultimately a win-win situation is achieved.

Let’s talk in detail about the operating procedures and skills for advertisers and creators.

2. Advertisers’ Delivery Process

Step 1: Identify core keywords

Step 2: Choose the right question

Step 3: Select appropriate answers under the question

Step 4: Place an order for cooperation

There are some things to note here, please continue to the third point.

3. Tips for advertisers to select and place orders

1. The topic is very important:

The number of questions followed and read should be large enough. At least choose questions with more than 1,000 followers. Use tools (Zhi+Backend) to sort questions by attention, likes, or favorites to quickly find large-volume questions.

2. Choose the appropriate answer:

Issue creation time: >30 days and within 2 years;

Give priority to content with high likes. The number of comments and the number of fans of the creator can be used as a reference;

Click to see the specific content quality and direction, and whether it is suitable for traffic diversion or marketing implantation.

3. Tips for mutual ordering:

Assignment title: preferably including the author's name.

Cooperation duration: 30 days by default, up to 360 days.

Cooperation bid: The minimum is 50% of the reference price, the author's acceptance rate is 30%, and the author is more willing to accept the order if the bid is above 500. If the author's daily price is high, 500 yuan for 30 days is recommended. If the author's daily price is low, about 500 yuan for 90 days is recommended. The key is the final price, and the author does not pay much attention to the cooperation period.

Bid: Evaluate by author level, occupation, fans; content interaction; content creation time; daily exposure of the current answer;

4. Creator's order acceptance process

1. Content modification:

Customer order deduction

The author accepts the order and leaves the contact information

The customer communicates offline to modify the content and provides the author with embedded content and plug-in links

The author inserts the content and link card, and the author applies for acceptance

Customer creates Zhi+ order, uploads content screenshots + selects order screenshots for review

Passed the review and released, the customer accepted the content and the status is in cooperation

Zhihu will pay the cooperation fee to users.

2. Content implantation:

Customer order deduction

Author accepts orders for implant cards and product information

Author acceptance, in cooperation

Customers create Zhi+ orders, upload content screenshots + select each other to place order screenshots for review

Approval passed + delivery

Zhihu will pay the cooperation fee to users

5. How can I make my content more easily selected for delivery?

1. Topic selection:

The topic should be precise and vertical. When choosing topics, you should pay attention to choosing very precise, vertical, and obvious issues in a certain field. If the topic is too broad, the investment value will be lost.

2. Answer angle:

The intention is to help readers, not just vent their own emotions. Experience, skills, strategies, etc. are most welcome.

3. Content quality:

Practical content is the most universal, with a combination of text and pictures within 1,000 to 3,000 words. It is better to have data, tables, and mind maps. The layout should be reasonable, without other external links, and there should be a certain quality guarantee (20 likes+).

6. How to maximize advertising revenue?

The advertiser's delivery mechanism and the system's pricing logic determine the creator's advertising fees.

From the above analysis:

Factors that influence advertisers’ decisions include:

The topic should have potential;

The content must be of sufficient quality;

Factors that influence bidding include:

Look at the author's level, occupation, and fans; look at content interaction; and content creation time.

So what should creators do?

Find potential problems:

1. Hot list issues:

Questions that meet the following 3 points:

1) Created within one week,

2) The number of views exceeds 20,000,

3) The number of responses should not exceed 100.

Questions with high page views and low number of answers appear on the list many times and have high page view increments per hour.

Once this type of question becomes a hot topic, no matter you are a novice or an old hand, you must give priority to answering this type of question, because it is very likely to become a hot topic on the entire site and bring great exposure.

2. General questions:

It has been on the hot list many times, has a stable daily pageview volume, a high number of answers and a high number of followers, and the daily pageview increase exceeds 10,000.

If your answer can be ranked at the front, you can get a huge amount of traffic recommended to you by the platform.

This type of exposure is continuous and stable, and if the content data is good, it can be directly converted into tens of thousands of yuan.

But please note that the competition for this type of question is relatively fierce, and big Vs are basically at the top of this type of question. It is more suitable for experienced Zhihu players, who can answer the questions directly and get extremely high exposure traffic.

3. Satisfy 1 and 2 at the same time:

Needless to say, you should get on it as soon as you see it, and get your ranking up before the problem breaks out.

The above is about topic selection. Next, let’s talk about how to optimize data.

Optimize content data:

Whether your content is high-quality is not determined by you, but by the system. Therefore, you must constantly send the system the message that you are "high-quality content" so that the system will label you as "high-quality content".

So let's talk about how to be marked as high-quality content by the system?

Hard indicators:

Word count: answers > 300 words, essays > 500 words;

Paragraphs: Every 200 words must be changed into a new paragraph, and the whole article should be divided into at least three paragraphs to relieve reading tension;

After editing on the PC, save the draft box and then format it on the mobile phone. This will have a better effect, because 2 lines on the PC are equivalent to 4 lines on the mobile phone, which will affect the reading experience.

Pictures: Insert at least one picture (mind map, tree diagram, table, chart, video, etc.);

Bold: On the one hand, it emphasizes the key points of the content, and on the other hand, it shows the main framework of the article through bold, so that readers can quickly grasp the main line of the article;

Reprint: Non-original content must indicate the source of the reprint;

There is another very important point: We all know that the more likes we get, the higher the ranking will be, and we also know that likes from big Vs are very important, so don’t be in a hurry to monetize at the beginning, and don’t have obvious marketing intentions, otherwise it will be difficult to get likes from big Vs.

Start traffic:

These 5 things can help you maximize your chances of getting free startup traffic.

1. Start following updates 2. Ask big V friends for help 3. Post ideas 4. Recommend content yourself 5. Topic binding optimization: Articles are bound to 3 topics, questions are bound to 5 topics, and the accuracy/breadth of the topic directly affects exposure.

Of course, friends who have Notification+ turned on can use Notification+ for cold start.

at last:

Through this review, I came to the following conclusion:

Whether creators or advertisers, if they want to gain revenue through the Zhi+Huxuan function, they still need to focus on the keyword "high-quality content".

From the creator's perspective, only by having the ability to create high-quality content can they be favored by advertisers and receive more mutual selection orders.

From the advertiser's perspective, only by having the ability to identify high-quality content can you ensure your conversion rate and other indicators, thereby obtaining a more ideal ROL, achieving your own business goals, and making every penny you invest play the greatest role.

We often say that everything has a threshold, but there is also this saying, I wonder if you have heard it?

The so-called threshold is a door if you have enough ability, and a threshold if you don’t have enough ability.

Most of the bumps and bumps in life are caused by lack of ability.

Author: Tianshu

Source: Lu Songsong's blog