How to quickly start a product promotion IP on Zhihu?

​

I have been operating the Zhihu live streaming project for nearly a year. During this process, I have been constantly thinking about how to do a better job in live streaming.

The so-called product promotion is essentially doing two things: promoting products to users and helping them make decisions.

Currently, most of our product promotion content is geared towards promoting products, but the content that helps users make decisions is not good enough.

An account selects a larger category and then recommends various products. Even if the user places an order, he or she will most likely not remember the account.

It has almost no effect on the conversion rate of the products you recommend later.

However, there is a type of account that focuses on a single category, and while promoting products, they help users make decisions through various methods. I call this type of account a product-carrying IP.

After my analysis and research, I finally came to a conclusion that the IP address that brings goods has vertical and precise fans, large enough content traffic, and a conversion rate much higher than that of ordinary accounts.

If you have also paid attention to this aspect, you will find that there are many sharing IPs that specialize in selling products. They have a lot of fans, and it is common for them to have tens of thousands of fans.

How is this done?

Today, through this article, I will teach you how to quickly start a selling IP on Zhihu.

The article is long, the following is the outline of the content:

1. What is a product-carrying IP? Why do we need a product-carrying IP?

1. The difference between a product-carrying IP and a personal IP

2. Advantages of being a product-selling IP on Zhihu

2. Preparation before creating a product IP

1. Choose the category you want to do

2. Basic account settings

3. Supplement professional knowledge and create material library

3. Operational procedures for creating a product-carrying IP

1. Basic knowledge you need to know

2. Five-paragraph topic selection method

3. Key points of content creation

4. How to trigger traffic

5. How to expand profits

1. What is a product-carrying IP? Why do we need a product-carrying IP?

1. The difference between a product-carrying IP and a personal IP

In recent years, the concept of personal IP has become increasingly known to the public.

Personal IP, an Internet term, refers to an individual's right to possess a certain achievement. In the Internet age, it can refer to a symbol, a value, a group with common characteristics, or a piece of content that brings its own traffic.

Everyone is a product. Treat yourself as the best product in your life. A personal brand is the best moat. Once it is built, it is difficult to copy. In the era of incremental economy, the value of personal IP may not have been fully demonstrated, but in the current era of stock economy, brand value will be reflected.

Source: Baidu Encyclopedia

The IP with goods sold is a type of personal IP. Unlike ordinary personal IPs that are monetized through courses, services, advertising fees, etc., the IP with goods sold relies mainly on earning product commissions when it is first created.

In addition to the income channel of product commission, after reaching a certain level of traffic and influence in the middle and late stages, you will also receive commercial promotion orders from brands. This part of the income is extremely considerable after you have enough influence.

2. The advantages of being a product-selling IP on Zhihu

When creating an IP that sells products, choosing a platform is inevitable. A suitable platform can magnify your income tenfold or a hundredfold.

The reason is simple: income = platform value + personal ability

From the perspective of the Zhihu platform, it has the following advantages:

1) Big enough

Zhihu is the largest knowledge content platform on the Chinese Internet. Its users are spread across first-tier to fourth-tier cities, ranging in age from 16 to 60 years old. The total number of users has reached 420 million, and the number of DUAs has reached 45 million. Data source: Zhihu February 2020

Only if the platform is large enough will your profit ceiling be high enough.

2) Accurate

Currently, as an IP selling products on Zhihu, our main output method is still text and pictures. Through the active searches of users on the site, we present the content we create to users in a way that solves problems one by one.

For example: A consumer is planning to buy an electric toothbrush with a budget of less than 300 yuan, so he is likely to search for long-tail keywords such as electric toothbrush under 300 yuan.

The search results are as follows:

This ensures that a large proportion of all users who read your article/answer are very accurate potential consumers.

Many of these users may have already decided that they want to buy this product, and all they need to do is read your article/answer to make the final decision. After reading it, if they feel it is suitable, they will place an order directly through the link. The transaction chain is very short and the process is smooth.

In addition to the long-tail effect mentioned above, Zhihu's articles/answers will also be displayed in Baidu's search results and have extremely high weight. With weight, there is traffic, and with traffic, there is revenue.

From the perspective of bringing goods, there are several advantages to using a goods-carrying IP:

1) Fast monetization speed and clear monetization path

Because the main source of income for a live streaming IP is earning product commissions when it was first created, one of the advantages of a live streaming IP is that the income method is clear, the chain is short, and the monetization speed is extremely fast.

If you create a product promotion IP on Zhihu and master the skills, you can obtain the product promotion rights within 7 days. After that, as long as your product promotion articles have views, there is a possibility of getting orders.

In actual operation, it is very common for both my students and the Tianshu self-operated team to obtain the first profit within 7 days.

2) It is more flexible and can be operated by a single person or in a team, with a higher ceiling for revenue.

As for IP that brings goods, this project is relatively flexible.

Ordinary people can work part-time and earn extra income, or they can switch from part-time to full-time and expand an IP, which will bring considerable income.

At the same time, you can also create a team and operate as a team. While stably outputting high-quality content, you can not only focus on a single category, but also operate multiple categories in batches.

3) It can be developed as a formal and long-term career or personal business

This is the most important point. Promoting IP is completely legal and does not violate any laws or regulations. Within the scope of the platform's rules, it can be developed as a career or personal undertaking.

The author personally believes that the industry of product reviews and promotion will be a rigid market need for many years to come.

Online shopping is different from traditional offline consumption. It is impossible for a consumer to come into contact with physical products of multiple brands to try them out in person and then decide which product to buy, as in offline shopping.

So in order to avoid making mistakes or to get a more detailed understanding of the products you want to buy, you naturally need to check out the reviews.

From this point alone, it can be determined that, unless there are major changes in the e-commerce industry, using IP to sell goods can be developed as a long-term career for individuals.

Compared with platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and WeChat, Zhihu is the most suitable place for newcomers to start.

If you agree with the points I made above, please continue reading and I will tell you in detail how to quickly launch a product-selling IP on Zhihu.

2. Preparation before creating a product IP

After deciding to create an IP for selling products on Zhihu, the next step is to make the following preparations.

1. Choose the category you want to do

"Promoting products" is a very broad term. The first step in launching an IP to promote products is to determine the category you want to sell.

If you don’t know how products are classified or what categories there are, you can open the homepage of JD.com or Taobao, where you can clearly know the classification of all products.

As shown in the picture above, there are so many types of goods. How do you determine the category you want to make?

Here are three criteria for you to judge. Through them, you can easily locate the category that suits you:

interested

Capable

Market needs

Interest means that you should be interested in the category you are about to work on. Interest is a very powerful driving force. If you work on a category that you don’t like at all, then the process of constantly researching this category in the future will be torture for you.

So, you must be interested, or to put it another way, not be disgusted by it.

Being capable means that the category you choose must be within your capabilities, both in terms of professional knowledge and financial conditions.

Here is an extreme example:

Xiao A is a stay-at-home guy with a monthly salary of 5,000 yuan. He comes from an average family and sells luxury watches and cars.

He himself has never actually come into contact with these things, and his financial situation does not allow him to do so. This is beyond his ability.

Market demand is easy to understand. The category you want to make must have a certain market demand. Without demand, there will be no consumption. How can you earn commissions?

After determining the category you are in, determine what type of product you have chosen and whether the market competition is fierce.

That is to say, whether it is a blue ocean product or a red ocean product, what the market demand is like, etc., so that we have a clear idea of ​​it.

We can search for relevant demand indexes through Baidu Index and E-commerce Business Advisor.

Baidu Index uses electric toothbrushes and electric shavers as examples:

It is obvious that the search index for electric toothbrushes is high, and accordingly, the demand for reviews is greater.

E-commerce business consultant:

As a Taobao data analysis software, Business Advisor can help Taobao sellers find blue oceans by analyzing category segmentation words; it can also be used to select categories using Zhihu IP to discover the market demand for your selected category on Zhihu.

The data that Business Advisor needs to refer to first include search popularity, transaction index and payment conversion rate. The priority factor is search popularity, followed by transaction index.

It is recommended to choose products with high search volume (high demand) and high transaction index (high turnover), because they represent high demand and commission.

After making a preliminary judgment on the category, I also want to confirm the market demand for this category in Zhihu.

The search analysis function of Business Advisor can perform related word analysis on designated keywords. These related words are the subdivided words of the word. For example, if I perform related word analysis on air conditioners, the subdivided brand words and related product words of air conditioners can come out.

We export these words by prefixing them:

“https://www.zhihu.com/search?type=content&q=”, import into Houyi collector for intelligent collection.

In the title link after intelligent collection, right click, data processing, regular extraction, enter this string of code

“https://www.zhihu.com/question/[1-9][0-9]{4,}”

At this time, the collected content can filter out the question and answer categories.

Then use the function of Zhihu Q&A to display the number of visitors, collect the number of visits, and mark the average daily number of visits for this category.

Then, through regular repeated collection, the difference in representative questions under this keyword can be calculated (generally all the questions that can be displayed on the search page). If the average daily visitors reach more than 10,000, it means that this is a field worth working on.

After doing all this, the next step is to understand the competition in the current category and the level and gameplay of current competitors.

The method is also very simple. In the search box of Zhihu, search for the keywords of the current category. For answer types, refer to the number of answers, question views, number of likes and other data.

For articles, we cannot check the number of views, so we can only use the number of likes, interactions and other data of the article as a reference.

Collect accounts from peers in the same category and some accounts with selling IP addresses, disassemble and analyze their operations and gameplay, have a clear understanding of the current situation, and absorb their experience for your own use.

2. Basic account settings

Next, you need to set up the basic account, and pay attention to the following points:

avatar:

According to the category you are working on, choose an avatar that suits your user aesthetics and current IP personality.

(PS: It is totally unacceptable for an uncle who sells tea to have a two-dimensional avatar.)

name:

The key point of naming is to make it simple, easy to remember, and in line with your personality and positioning. For example, people’s names feel more real.

introduce:

Just ask these three questions to help readers understand who you are, what you do, and what your advantages are.

For example, if you find that there is a high demand for losing weight without exercise, you can write the introduction as "In 3 months, I lost 39 pounds just by eating."

Other personal information: Bind your mobile phone number and complete the following information as much as possible.

During later operations, pay attention to avoid violations and try to increase the "salt value" of the account. High-value accounts will have more rights and interests.

3. Supplement professional knowledge and create material library

After completing the first two items, you need to create a material library.

The material library includes three aspects: current category keywords, question bank, and professional knowledge.

The purpose of expanding keywords is to obtain long-tail traffic and discover user needs.

This can be done using Baidu Index's demand graph, Aizhan.com, 5188 and other keyword mining tools.

The establishment of a question bank has two functions. One is to facilitate topic selection when creating content in the future, and the other is to discover users' pain points, pleasure points, etc.

Here you can directly search for the current keyword on Zhihu, or enter the topic of the current category, collect questions and articles under the current keyword, and then organize and analyze them.

The main purpose of learning professional knowledge of related categories is to create better content. The more professional knowledge you know about the current category, the more comfortable you will be when creating content, and the higher the quality will be.

3. Operational procedures for creating a product-carrying IP

1. Basic knowledge you need to know

Now, you are basically ready to start operations, but before that, you still need to understand some basic knowledge.

1) The initial goal of launching an IP is to accumulate fans, increase its weight, establish a personal image and gain trust, and in the process, polish its own content and establish the update frequency.

2) There are two types of IPs that carry goods. One is the evaluation type, which is divided into cloud evaluation and physical evaluation. Among them, the effect and conversion rate of physical evaluation are generally higher than those of cloud evaluation.

The other is the professional sharing type, which is to promote products by taking the professional knowledge of the current category as the main content and combining it with professional knowledge.

These two forms have their own advantages and disadvantages, and there is no distinction between them. You need to choose your own content production form according to your ability. Either way, the profits will be considerable enough if you do it well.

2. Five-paragraph topic selection method

Phase 1:

Select questions under the sub-topics of your field and accumulate weight under that topic. It is easier to get started with small topics and the effect is more obvious.

Phase 2:

The system will slowly invite you to answer questions based on the areas of your answers. When you answer the questions invited by the system, don't answer too many questions. It's best to answer less than half of the number of followers, otherwise the competition will be too fierce and it will be difficult to get ahead.

Phase 3:

The above article encourages you to pay attention to your peers and find benchmarks for yourself.

Search for relevant keywords and find peers who can serve as your benchmark. According to experience, the questions chosen by peers are very valuable for reference, especially those with a large number of followers, a large number of views, and less than 200 answers.

If enough peers pay attention to this issue, the system will show that they are also paying attention to this issue. The more peer leaders pay attention to this issue, the greater the potential of this issue.

Such questions must be answered. Even if you don't have time to answer them, you should accumulate them into your own question bank. As more and more big names join in, the popularity of this question will continue to rise, and your answer will also be exposed.

Phase 4:

Search keywords in the site. The higher the ranking of the searched questions, the greater the traffic.

Phase 5:

If your weight in this field increases, the ranking of your answers in this field will be higher than before. At this time, you can answer questions that are often on the hot list in your field. Such questions have long-term discussion value and the quality must be solid.

By checking the question log, you can know whether the question is on the hot list.

3. Create content

The user's consumption chain is attention - decision-making - purchase. Our content is mainly to help users make decisions. If you can do that, when the user places an order, you get a commission. You can’t do that. If users don’t place orders, you won’t get any commission. It’s such a simple logic.

Our ultimate goal is to achieve both exposure and conversion. Such content generally includes one or more of the following elements:

1) Solve users’ confusion and concerns and hit their pain points.

2) The content should be objective, fair and professional, so that users can have enough trust in you.

3) The content is interesting and users can gain knowledge after reading it.

If you are a complete novice and have never had any writing experience, please read my article:

How to write a high-quality business article?

Learn the basic writing framework, and then write dozens or hundreds of articles in a certain category. In the process, analyze more well-done articles by peers, and you will naturally know how to write. At the same time, you can also try to summarize your own writing style and content production template.

This step requires hard work. Slow is fast, and pursuing shortcuts is basically taking a detour.

4. How to trigger traffic?

The mind map below is how Zhihu content is disseminated.

After understanding the principle, it is not difficult to find that the key to obtaining traffic in our daily life lies in gaining more approval and interaction through high-quality content, and then hitting the keywords in the article title to obtain long-tail traffic.

Here are some practical ways to increase traffic:

Content interlinking:

For each article, I will link to it wherever possible in the text, just like weaving a web.

On the one hand, this will help readers with their reference, because some readers will not click on your homepage to read your other content. Strong links are more likely to be clicked by readers.

On the other hand, if one piece of content goes viral, it will trigger other content to achieve traffic diversion.

Be careful not to link to each other mindlessly. For example, in this article, I will link to previous articles related to Zhihu knowledge points. If I link to articles like TikTok, it will be abrupt.

On Zhihu, mindless cross-linking is irrelevant and violates platform regulations.

From collection:

It will also be effective if you save it to yourself after posting it.

Send ideas:

Ideas will also appear on the fans' follow page. As long as it can remind users and gain more exposure, just do it. It's a convenient thing. Posting ideas will also increase account activity and increase salt value.

Content recommendation:

If any content has received good feedback, you can use it to recommend the content yourself. Each person can do this three times a month. If it is useless, it will be updated next month, wasting the opportunity for free display.

Embrace the thighs of Zhihu big V:

From my popular answer dissemination analysis report, I can see that answers liked by big Vs are very useful for push and exposure. Big Vs in the same field are the best, but big Vs in different fields also play a significant role.

interactive:

Like and reply to those who commented on you to increase interaction and increase popularity faster.

Remember this formula: Revenue = Exposure * Conversion Rate * Commission

During the operation, we should mainly optimize around these key indicators and make up for what is not working well.

5. How to expand the income after running a single account?

When your single account is running smoothly, if you want to get more benefits, there are two ideas for reference:

1. Increase product categories, create new IPs, and build an account matrix.

2. If you don’t have the energy to create more accounts, you can become a paying player and increase exposure and improve revenue by investing in Zhi+.

If your conditions permit, you can use Zhi+ to increase the speed of account development during the account creation stage. For more content and uses of Zhi+, you can check out my previous article.

Zhi+ Paid Promotion: My experience in advertising with 30,000 RMB

4. Final

Entering the market as a newbie and becoming a product-selling IP on Zhihu can monetize very quickly, which means it can quickly bring you positive and negative feedback, and ultimately support you in completing the journey to becoming a big shot.

You know, for ordinary people like us, the threshold for creating an IP to sell goods is low enough but the upper limit is high enough.

I can almost come to the conclusion that there is only one reason why a normal person cannot accomplish this: laziness.

Remember this sentence:

At the beginning,

We are all ordinary people.

When you do that,

It's not ordinary.

Flowery moves will ruin you, but down-to-earth work will make you successful.

Author: Tianshu

Source: Lu Songsong's blog