Zhihu Promotion: 5000-word long article to teach you how to quickly increase Zhihu followers

I will strangle the traffic by the throat and stand in the pile of traffic and cheer; I will hold the knife of traffic and stab it into the heart of all projects.

Traffic is the lifeblood of online marketing; traffic is the core engine that drives a project. Almost all Internet companies are traffic-driven companies, and almost all entrepreneurs are happy or sad about traffic.

There is a legend on the Internet that whoever can travel in the long river of traffic will obtain the wealth and treasure in the gate of traffic. I am fortunate to have uncovered a corner of Zhihu's traffic, so I wrote this article to share with you.

Looking back at Zhihu’s development history, Zhihu is actually a slow company. It took ByteDance eight years to create a giant with a valuation of hundreds of billions, while Zhihu took seven years to develop into a unicorn worth 1 billion US dollars.

A low valuation does not mean a low value, especially for people in the Internet industry. If you cannot get a share of Toutiao’s 1 billion traffic, it is worthless. Zhihu has 30 million daily active users, but I only have a small share, which is worth a fortune.

When talking about traffic, we are accustomed to measuring it in quantity, but we must not forget that the value of traffic is not equal to that of other traffic. The 3,000 followers on Toutiao are far less than the 3,000 followers on a personal account, and the 3,000 followers on Douyin are far less than the 3,000 followers on a public account.

And I tell you quietly that the 3,000 followers on Zhihu are equivalent to those on a public account. Many people may find this unbelievable and incredible, but it is indeed true.

Zhihu accounts for half of the Internet's high-quality users. With its high-net-worth user base, Zhihu has actually been favored by brands a long time ago. It is the preferred marketing position for big brands and also a money-burning plaza for paid traffic.

The early users of Zhihu were playing for the sake of prestige and for the topic of conversation. Whoever was lucky enough to receive an official Zhihu registration invitation was flattered and overjoyed. Doesn’t the privacy permission itself mean a sense of accomplishment?

Over time, many of those early users have become "Zhihu Big Vs", "answerers with millions of collections", "gold medal answerers", and "ace big names". While their influence has been recognized by industry content, they have also made a lot of money.

Take advantage of the paid Zhihu service and become a big shot. Their influence is not only on Zhihu, but also spread to the entire online platform with the help of Zhihu's fame.

Zhihu has these high-quality premium contents and has grown from a small fish pond into a big river. Do you ask how big the traffic of Zhihu is? Zhihu reached 200 million users in 2018. Do you ask how much traffic Zhihu has? Zhihu has 30 million daily active users. How many big Vs on Zhihu have more than 10,000 followers? At most, there are less than 20,000 people.

Among the above figures, I found that there is something wrong. There are less than 20,000 big Vs with 10,000 followers. As far as I know, there are actually less than 10,000 (including authors who have given up or stopped updating). In other words, less than 10,000 big Vs have divided up hundreds of millions of traffic on Zhihu. You can imagine how big a blue ocean Zhihu's traffic market is.

Starting today, become a deep traffic-generating player on Zhihu; starting today, concentrate on creating high-quality content on Zhihu; starting today, become a traffic harvesting machine, facing Zhihu and the sea of ​​traffic.

I want Zhihu traffic, but I don’t know how to attract traffic. What should I do?

Don’t worry, today’s article will talk about Zhihu’s traffic-generating methods.

1. Zhihu IP Image Tips

Clothes make the man, and saddles make the horse. When running Zhihu, the first thing to do is to have a good image project. We are all decent people, so don't just post pictures of pretty girls all over the forum, or use wild and barbaric methods to push up the posts crazily. Instead, package the account information beautifully to increase the traffic efficiency several times.

Zhihu’s face-saving project: background picture, avatar, place of residence, industry, educational background, personal profile, one-sentence introduction, don’t miss any of them and arrange them all.

There are three more important things here: avatar, one-sentence introduction, and username .

1. Profile Picture

Zhihu is a community for communication, and a warm community at that. Everyone expresses their attitudes and opinions here, and it is easier to gain users' favor by using character pictures. Handsome guys can post their own handsome photos. If you don’t want to post handsome photos, you can post pictures of movie and TV characters, or pictures of character images. In short, try to use character image pictures.

2. One sentence introduction

The key point here is that this is almost the only advertising location officially recognized by Zhihu. Whether it is a V or a public account, you can leave your ad here. How to write highly convertible copy in just a dozen words? The answer is to throw bait and give users what they want.

3. Username

Make it as lifelike and interesting as possible.

A guy once asked me why my Zhihu followers weren’t increasing. I asked him to send me his nickname so I could search it, and the result was “V:…”.

I was confused, "Brother, how can you increase your followers by using the same method you use on Tieba and Baidu to play Zhihu?" Everyone just remember one thing, you are not here to attract traffic, you are not here to market, you are here to share value, you are here to make friends.

As long as the content produced is valuable and recognized by readers, it is normal for a public account to attract thousands of followers. I previously attracted 8,000 public account fans with an article.

Due to limited space, we will not elaborate on the packaging of other accounts here. You can find big Vs in the same field on Zhihu and imitate them to package your own account.

2. Zhihu Content Philosophy

To attract traffic on the Internet, either people look for information or information looks for people. In the end, these are the only two ways to attract traffic.

When talking about content, we need to have long-term content positioning.

Take public accounts for example. If you post health articles today and beauty articles tomorrow, it will be difficult for such a public account to survive. You don’t know who your user groups are, and others don’t know what value you can bring to them. Such a public account will find it difficult to increase followers and realize cash.

Every profession must be specialized. Beauty public accounts only output beauty knowledge, and skin care public accounts only output content in the skin care field. The same is true for Zhihu. By continuously answering questions in vertical fields, not only will the fans be vertical, but the account weight will also be high.

If you want vertical content, you only need to stick to three ideas: readers, fish ponds, and peers.

1. Reader

Readers are users. Whoever your product is aimed at is your reader.

You just need to find the topics that readers are interested in and answer them, and the content positioning will not deviate. For example, if the product is a postgraduate entrance examination course, then the users are college students, and the content can be developed along the direction of "learning methods - college life - postgraduate entrance examination" and so on.

2. Fish Pond

The fish pond is the user gathering point.

People who follow makeup topics are all interested in makeup. On Zhihu, a topic keyword is a fish pond. The fish in the fish pond are your precise users. Content creation can be developed based on the issues in the fish pond. In this way, the content is output around the target users and attracts the target users.

3. Peers

Peers are the objects of benchmarking and imitation.

Anyone who has achieved success on Zhihu has worked hard on account operations. They all have a certain understanding of Zhihu's algorithm rules. By benchmarking against outstanding peers in the same field and following their peers in content output, it is easy for them to find the right direction for content output.

3. The secret of Zhihu's hits

When entering an unfamiliar field, the fastest way to achieve results is to repeat successful cases. All popular products have been tested by time. The appearances of popular products are different, but the essential elements of popular products are the same. Find the common features among the popular products and absorb them into the content, and the popularity of the content will instantly soar by 3 times.

How to write a highly praised answer on Zhihu as quickly as possible?

I think there are two techniques: the first is to analyze the reasons for the success of your peers; the second is to analyze the reasons for their failure. For example, if you are answering a question on Zhihu now, but you don’t know how to create good content or what good content is, you can refer to the existing highly-rated answers.

Remember, whether you are an expert in writing or not, you need to do this step.

Over the past period of time, the creators of Zhihu have developed a unique writing style, which has left an impression on readers. Authors who have written many popular answers can even roughly predict how many likes a certain answer will receive.

This style is also very different from other platforms.

In this way, if an article with more than 100,000 views from a public account is posted on Zhihu without any modification, it may not even get 100 likes. A popular article with 1 million views on Toutiao may not even get 30 likes on Zhihu. The Zhihu platform has its own mature content system.

How to disassemble the successful elements of highly-rated answers and incorporate them into your own answers?

There are only four tricks: break down the beginning of the answer, break down the content layout, break down the main content, and break down the ending of the article.

1. Break down the beginning of the answer

In Zhihu articles, each module has its own mission to accomplish. What is the beginning?

The first 30-100 words of the main text have the same function as the article title and video cover - to attract readers to come in and click. Zhihu uses a waterfall flow content display method. Before readers click, only the beginning of the content is displayed to readers. Whoever can make readers want to click in will have more exposure rights.

If you want to write a good Zhihu introduction, first go to Zhihu to collect excellent examples.

Regardless of whether the answer is in the same field as yours or not, as long as the beginning content attracts you, makes you want to click in, makes you want to read on, and makes you feel the amazing writing style, collect them all into Excel or Word document. Then disassemble and analyze.

Break down the beginnings of 100 highly-rated answers. How could you not write a good beginning?

2. Typography

The layout of Zhihu is very important because Zhihu readers have very high requirements for reading experience. If you pay close attention, you will find that 90% of the highly-praised answers on Zhihu have exquisite layout. The typesetting here refers to the text structure. For example, how to make a public account article comfortable, beautiful and exquisite for readers to read is the typesetting.

Zhihu's layout pursues a sense of refinement, making people feel comfortable and aesthetically pleasing. Especially for answers about recommending good things, the one with more exquisite pictures and more beautiful layout will attract more readers' attention and gain more exposure and display if the content quality is similar.

The beauty of a picture depends on its source. If you don’t know how others find good-looking pictures, just search other people’s pictures in Baidu Image Recognition and collect the pictures you need from website sources.

The answer format is simpler. The functions provided by Zhihu's answer box are relatively simple, so the layout issues mainly involve controlling text spacing, line spacing, and white space.

How to format an answer beautifully?

It's simple. Find five articles that you think have good typeset, remove the formatting in Word, and typeset them again from scratch in the answer box following others' formatting. After three or five articles, your typesetting skills will improve rapidly.

4. Zhihu’s main text philosophy

It’s a bit confusing and inconsistent with Zhihu’s high-end style. The main text of Zhihu is more like a supplement to the opinions. How do you understand this sentence?

Take information content for example. The content consists of one picture and the rest is edited. The main content of Zhihu sometimes also has this feeling. If I have to use one word to describe it, it would be business dry goods.

It is the kind of "the content is very good and professional, you gain a lot from reading it, but you don't know what you learned." Business dry goods are similar to this form. Business dry goods do not mean that Zhihu's content quality is low. This is an inevitable problem of Internet content in the fast-food era.

In fact, apart from some vertical communities, Zhihu is still one of the platforms with the highest content quality on the entire Internet, and its creation threshold exceeds that of most content platforms. This is why Zhihu fans are so valuable.

Before we move on to the next topic, let’s discuss a question first. Do you think big Vs are proficient in all walks of life?

I don't think so. But on Zhihu you see some big Vs who answer everything, they know everything in every field and are particularly professional in different industries, as if they know everything. And the most outrageous thing is that most of their answers are highly praised. So, the most important thing to write highly praised posts on Zhihu is not professional knowledge, but content creation skills.

Just like Xiucai, a handsome man without makeup, who never uses cosmetics, wrote answers in the field of beauty and makeup that were applauded by Zhihu big Vs and even given a professional badge.

Back to the topic, how do you write business content?

The main text should be well-reasoned and logical, with examples as a supplement. The viewpoint should come first, then the case. Cases can be found based on the viewpoint. Specifically, if you say that you are handsome, you cannot simply say I am handsome, everyone says I am handsome, I am really handsome, I am so handsome. Words without examples are empty and boring.

• You should say this: "According to the data, among the people who have come into contact with me, 50% think I am as handsome as Pan An, 30% think I am very good-looking, and 20% think I am only slightly more handsome than most people. Judging from the feedback from the data, I am really very handsome."
• You should be like this: "When I walk on the street, I often meet girls who come to chat with me. Some even run up to me and give me a bunch of roses and leave. I am really worried about my appearance."
• You should say this: "I have a friend who sent good morning messages to his goddess for a month, but the goddess ignored him. Suddenly one day, the goddess asked him out for milk tea. My friend was ecstatic, but after they met and chatted for a while, he found out that the goddess came to ask him for my information. His heart was broken."

You see, simply stating the truth is far less convincing than using cases. On Zhihu, this style of content is popular. The feast of Zhihu is actually a carnival of the pleasure of knowledge. Whoever has stronger logic and better cases will be more persuasive, and while convincing readers, they will also gain their professional recognition.

This is how business dry goods are written. Everything is written around viewpoints and cases. Viewpoints are the soul that runs through the entire text, and cases and materials are the flesh and blood of the article.

The answers and opinions on Zhihu cannot be too mediocre. Even if they are not earth-shattering, they should at least make readers feel fresh. You can write highly praised answers based on the following dimensions: "bourgeois life, professional, heavy enthusiast, personal experience, comprehensive answer from a crawler, counter-attack person, data fanatic, paper emperor..."

5. Tips for the end of Zhihu articles

That’s pretty much the content of the main article. Let’s talk about the ending of the answer.

From my personal creative experience, the ending of Zhihu is the most suitable module for preserving character settings and playing the emotional card. How important is the ending of Zhihu article?

Let’s put it this way: you write a long article, the content is exciting, the readers are happy to read it, and you get exposure, but then the readers scroll away. There are a lot of wonderful contents on Zhihu, but they only increase exposure but not followers. Everyone is a freeloader. For example, if I don’t remind you, you won’t remember to like this article. If you don’t leave an impression on readers, they will forget you.

In order to make readers remember you and be interested in you, you need to leave your own personality at the end of your answer.

How to establish a character?

There are some very good writing skills. The first one is similar to the advice between friends, such as "I have said so much, but you may not understand it just by reading it, and you may not do it just by understanding it. The most important thing is to take action. Everyone must XXX". Another example is interacting with readers. It is easy to narrow the distance with readers, and everyone can feel your sincerity.

These two methods are very good and are very suitable for the ending of a useful article, because you are helping others solve problems with all your heart, and when people recognize your answer, they will also recognize you as the author. But this method may not be suitable for all answers to questions, so you can use other ways to end it.

Create a sense of surprise. If your answer is very long and dry, people will think you are serious and attentive if you put a summary of the whole article at the end; making a small supplement to the content at the end and leaving little easter eggs for everyone to give people a sense of surprise are all small tricks to increase your followers.

Due to limited space, the above are the Zhihu operation methods and techniques shared with you for this answer.

The idea behind the highly praised writing on Zhihu is actually not complicated. It should be said that everything that is put into practice is not complicated. It’s just that many people are unable to achieve perfection in the details. They fail to carefully observe and study the cases of their peers, refine the routines into methodology, and practice them deliberately.

I said earlier that if you want to write an answer that will quickly increase your followers on Zhihu, you should observe and study the highly-rated answers. There must be a reason for the success of the top-rated answers, which must be either strong logic, good formatting, beautifully written, lively and interesting, well-reasoned, or hitting the pain points, or causing resonance.

“If you read 300 Tang poems carefully, you will be able to recite them even if you cannot compose poems.” This is the truth.

Finally, I’d like to share with you a particularly useful writing tip: good content has its own merits, but bad content is all the same.

No matter what question you are answering, you should first analyze why some of the answers to this question are not popular. It is like everyone is solving a math problem, and the people before you have approached the problem from different directions. Some got the correct answer, and some got it wrong. You have seen many wrong ideas, so is your probability of finding the correct answer greater?

Summarize the reasons why their answers were poorly written, and you will subconsciously avoid these pitfalls when writing. In the long run, the quality and level of your articles will be significantly improved.

Author: Xiucai

Source: Xiucai Youliao