10 tips on traffic

And this should not happen, including bigwigs who have received tens of millions of dollars in financing.

So today I would like to share some thoughts on the topic of traffic, some of which I think everyone needs to be deeply aware of.

01. All transactions are traffic

There is a saying that goes, "Good wine needs no bush," which means that if a product is good, there will definitely be customers who will buy it.

But I think this also has prerequisites. The first is how do others know the aroma of the wine in the first place? Who released the information about the aroma of wine?

There are two points here. One is the channel or site selection to promote the wine, and the other is the good word-of-mouth among customers to promote it.

So the core premise is still traffic.

Many people think that good products will naturally attract traffic, but in fact we are not short of good products, it’s just that many customers want to buy good products for less money.

I hope everyone will be aware of traffic at all times.

The purpose of choosing a location for an offline store is to find good traffic, as do various ground promotion activities. Writing articles and shooting videos for self-media are also to accumulate traffic.

Don’t prepare everything and then look for traffic at the end!

02. 10 suggestions for traffic

1. There must be someone in the team who understands traffic and channels

There must be someone in the team who understands traffic, that’s for sure!

In other words, even if he doesn’t understand something in the team at the beginning, he can find channels.

Know who to cooperate with and how to use the traffic for your own benefit.

I sincerely advise friends who want to start a business that if you don’t have traffic or there is no one on your team who understands traffic, don’t start a business easily.

On the contrary, it would be much better if one of your partners understands traffic.

For example, if you are running an online channel, how much traffic do you have or how many channels do you understand?

If you are doing an offline chain franchising or outlet construction project, can you expand it to dozens or even hundreds of cities across the country overnight?

However, if your team only has product and technical partners but no channel or traffic partners, the probability of failure is very high.

Especially in recent years, social e-commerce projects have been very popular.

Whether it is agent Taoke such as Fenxiang and Haosheng, or membership models such as Yunji and Beidian.

They all looked for traffic partners at the beginning. For example, the previous traffic team of Yunji Darling Home was BK Community, and Fenxiang’s traffic team originally came from a micro-business team of hundreds of thousands of people in Guangzhou.

Let’s take a look at it again. The reason why Sibu’s Future Market and Life with Fish were able to grow in a short period of time was because of Wu Zhaoguo’s WeChat business team, right?

If you want to engage in social e-commerce, it will be extremely difficult to get started without a WeChat business team.

2. There is never any free traffic

I've been in interviews and worked on some projects, and there have been times when the bosses asked or requested if it was possible to improve performance without spending money.

Actually, it’s really difficult for me.

First, my ability and experience are limited, and second, I really haven’t found such a good method.

If I can complete the project without spending any money, why should I go to work?

There has never been fast and good traffic. Even on Douyin and Kuaishou, many people can get a large amount of free traffic, but there are prerequisites.

That's what he did before this.

Even if there is free traffic, how long are you willing to spend to accumulate it?

For example, if the village chief is written as Shili Village, it seems that no money was spent.

But if I work full-time in a company and write, which boss would be willing to pay one or two years' salary for nothing just to see results?

3. There is no free and quick way to increase volume

This week I met two people who told me that they wanted to make some money quickly and asked if there was any way to make money immediately.

I was really surprised at the time because everyone wanted to make money. Even if there is a method, others will hide it secretly and make money quietly.

Just like in an offline meeting, how many people will tell you the real stuff?

The village chief himself, who wrote about Shili Village, has a deep understanding of this.

For newbies like you and me, we can only work hard and accumulate fans slowly.

As I said before, are you willing to spend 3 to 5 years accumulating connections, traffic and resources?

There are several authors on Toutiao. I have been following them from 2018 to now, and I have witnessed with my own eyes that their accounts have grown from tens of thousands of followers to 700,000 or 800,000 followers, or even to over a million followers.

The precursor to rapid success is what traffic preparations you have made before the explosion.

Either you accumulate traffic yourself, for example, many self-media accounts on the market have accumulated tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of fans before monetizing through e-commerce.

4. Learn to reserve traffic at any time

Don’t wait until you need traffic to find out that you don’t have it. We must always be aware of traffic and even more so, retention .

The first point has been mentioned, traffic is the prerequisite for all transactions.

a. External traffic

If you are not a channel or business person, you may be a product, technology, or operation person.

No matter when, you have to contact some people who control the traffic. They may be advertising companies, MCN agencies, or WeChat businessmen and big Vs.

Maintain a good relationship with them, as it may be useful when you start your own business in the future.

b. Own traffic

If you are a merchant, KOL or other person with traffic, you need to retain your own traffic.

The WeChat private domain traffic we are talking about now is extremely important.

A few days ago, a paying member of Shili Village was communicating with the village chief. He had previously sold tens of millions of goods himself, and several of his products made 200 million through the Yunji channel in just one festival.

Now that he has started his own business, he is faced with the problem of having goods but no private domain traffic.

Because I never thought about adding users to my WeChat or directing them to my official account.

You must learn to reserve traffic. Offline, whether you are selling hairdressing, clothing, commodities, or construction, you must consciously add customers on WeChat.

There is a very vivid offline example, a mobile stall selling barbecue, which adds its customers to WeChat and WeChat groups, and informs the time and place every time it sets up the stall.

Some customers cannot go to the site themselves, so once they know the location, they ask Flash Express to pick it up.

5. Find your own traffic pool

There are thousands of traffic channels on the market, but each channel and each type of traffic has its own characteristics and population.

Offline channels such as schools, hospitals, train stations, and bus stations have traffic that is very stable.

But if you use this kind of channel traffic to sell luxury goods or building materials and cement, it would be a waste of traffic.

For example, Douyin influencers are very popular for selling goods, but it is obviously a wrong choice to ask Brother Pomegranate to sell Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

We need to find the exact customers that meet our needs based on the products we produce and the services we provide.

Unless your product has a very wide audience and you have enough budget, you can support indiscriminate general investment.

There are also people like the village chief who are doing self-media. There are at least 100 self-media channels on the market, but the articles I write are definitely not suitable for posting on Phoenix.com.

Or, if I make trendy videos and want to sell the products on Kuaishou, there is a high chance that I won’t be able to sell them.

Every person and every product should find your own channel and then save the traffic.

6. Only traffic can be called compound interest

There is a term in financial management called compound interest, which means interest on interest.

This should be a money-making model that everyone wants to create. For entrepreneurs, they also want to be successful every time they start a new project.

But I think having money is far from enough. The two projects I have personally experienced both raised more than 30 million yuan in financing, but the team at the time were all from operations and product backgrounds. No one understood the real traffic gameplay, and there was no traffic accumulation at the beginning.

You should think about why many mature brands are so good when launching a new product.

Why is it that a platform always runs faster than others when developing new businesses, even if it starts late.

Isn’t the most core reason to have your own traffic pool?

Although success is not guaranteed, the probability of success is definitely higher than that of other teams.

For those who have failed in their first or second business venture, it will be difficult to get started if they have not accumulated traffic before.

In financial management, we call it compound interest, and in entrepreneurship I call it compound volume, which means directing the traffic of the original project to the new project.

7. There is no shortage of ideas/products on the market

When you decide to start a business, don't assume that you are the first person to have this idea.

Whether it is mobile power supplies, shared bicycles or community group purchasing, they have existed for many years.

In addition to infrastructure such as equipment and networks, the most important point is the lack of traffic.

Those who want to do it do not have the ability to acquire, control and amplify traffic.

Why are there always hundreds of sellers queuing outside the live broadcast rooms of Simba and Viya, and why can they sell tens or millions of goods just by going on the live broadcast room?

Isn’t it because they control the traffic?

Finding a good product is really easy.

Because the difficulty of perfecting and improving a product is much lower than the difficulty of obtaining traffic.

8. Accurate and loyal traffic is more valuable

We still need to look at traffic dialectically, although we hope to have a steady flow of traffic.

But compared with large traffic and general traffic, what we care more about is accurate traffic, old traffic and loyal traffic.

a. Accurate flow

You are in the education and training business, where does your traffic come from?

At the school gate, at the community gate, and on various maternal and child channels and communities.

That’s why when you create an advertising plan on each platform, there are various delivery conditions set up, because we want you to be more precise in your delivery.

b. Old customers and old traffic

The idea of ​​many people doing business is to harvest one customer at a time, rather than to get the user to make repeat purchases.

You should know that the cost of acquiring a new user must be higher than the cost of spending on old users.

More importantly, the cost of attracting new customers from old ones must be much lower than the cost of attracting new customers yourself.

c. Loyal traffic

If you have customers who spend more than 4 or 5 times a year with you, you have to focus on spending time serving these users.

Some companies will offer exclusive membership services for these customers. A large amount of data proves that old and loyal users contribute at least 60% of the value to a brand and product.

Especially for high-net-worth services or individual entrepreneurs, there is no need to pursue hundreds of millions of users. It is enough to serve 1,000-5,000 consumers or fans well.

For example, if you sell high-end tea and a customer spends 1,000 a year, you only need to serve 500 customers. Group purchases and corporate gift orders may also be generated.

If you sell higher-end personal services, the number may be even smaller.

For example, a former boss of mine charged 5,000 yuan per person for a paid community, and he only accepted 100 people, so the total cost was 500,000 yuan a year.

9. Don’t ignore offline traffic

Internet transformation has been mentioned for many years, and network traffic is also sought after by countless people.

But customers live in real scenarios, and offline business will always exist because offline traffic will always exist.

For many industries, offline traffic is always the largest and most valuable traffic.

In the past two years, community group buying and fresh food e-commerce platforms have always focused on community traffic entrances.

10. Don’t ignore small traffic

Except for large enterprises and projects with large funds, for more than 99% of grassroots entrepreneurs, I hope everyone can recognize the value of small traffic.

Think about it, why some people still post flyers in toilets and hand out small cards on cars?

Why do gyms and real estate sales still need to hand out flyers at subway entrances?

This kind of traffic may not look good, but it is often very accurate and continuous.

Also, many of our friends are doing Taobao/WeChat business, and they should have done offline promotion, or at least their agents have done it.

For example, everyone is talking about Zhihu, Douban, and Toutiao for traffic, but most of the time there are not hundreds or thousands of traffic every day.

In most cases, there are only two or three friends a day, and sometimes there may be more than ten.

But if you look at it over a year, you would have thousands of friends.

Remember, small traffic does not mean no value.

For grassroots, it is more important to pay attention to the value of small traffic.

Author: Village Chief

Source: Shili Village