Use private domain traffic to achieve ROI of 1:100 for educational products

I have been wanting to write this article for a year. I have been thinking about whether I should write an article about the operation of my own educational products. Finally, I wrote it. This is different from the educational product line of a large company. It is more of a case of how a small educational institution survives.

When we operate educational products, there is no strong endorsement. With a YY account, a website, a tutorial, and four or five people, we can make a profit of more than 200,000 yuan a month, with private domain traffic of about 2,000 people. Of course, we later implemented the fission gameplay and partner agency system.

Some of the things we played with at the beginning are no longer suitable for the current environment, but the ideas for organizing them are still the same. This is because the ideas in Internet gameplay have been changing, but the essence has not changed. As long as we grasp the essence, we can still do a good job in product operations in the education industry.

We started from scratch, earned over 2 million a year, and finally closed down! A series of changes made me realize the limitations of the team at that time. The market was changing, but we had not changed. I will also elaborate on this in detail in the last chapter, under the section on personal limitations, and will also point out new paths that can be expanded.

product

Like all Internet marketing courses, ours is also a complete Internet marketing course. In front of large professional organizations, we basically have no selling points.

We don’t have famous teachers, big companies, public listings, etc.

Even for the current vocational education group's courses, the tuition for two months of study is about 20,000 yuan. We have 12 classes, held on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday evenings. One class is about 2 hours long, and we charge 6,000 yuan. In comparison, our online version has no advantages at all.

However, we also noticed three points: first, many people do not want to quit their jobs to learn marketing knowledge; second, current Internet marketing training is highly theoretical and lacks practical skills. Most training institutions teach comprehensive content such as website building, SEO, SEM, new media, etc.

There is relatively little content about off-line platforms, and there is no systematic book to talk about this part, so we have found differentiation in the direction of question-and-answer platforms, forums, BBS, blogs, etc.

Moreover, our content is similar to finding loopholes in the platform and exploiting loopholes in the rules. This type of content is not presentable to large-scale training institutions. Most training institutions do not talk about it, and there are relatively few people who truly master this kind of content. Therefore, our content is positioned as black technology for full-network marketing.

We have completely separated our content from that of other training institutions and have established our own positioning and market segment. In this market segment, we have enough space to support ourselves.

All our subsequent work will be centered around this part, and subsequent work has also proved that this market is large enough to support a small company.

market

According to our market segmentation, there are people who have learned online marketing but cannot achieve results; people who have not learned online marketing but want to learn; and people who are working and want to improve their abilities through online marketing.

According to the market segments, these groups of people have one thing in common, that is, they want to learn about Internet marketing! Choose different channels according to the different market segments of these people.

We have preliminarily divided these groups of people, prepared different materials according to these segments, and placed them on different channels. Now a bigger and more serious problem lies before us. The company has no money to conduct bidding and other content placement.

Nowadays, all the channels for spending money are monopolized by big companies, especially those listed vocational education companies. If you want to snatch some people from them, it will cost a lot of money.

After we determined that we didn’t have the money to play these channels, we decided to start with our existing technology. What we call black technology is to break other people’s rules, which these large vocational education groups cannot use. We did what we taught at hand, so we divided it into two parts:

As for the traffic from Baidu searches and the traffic from media distribution, we have to say that the self-media’s distribution mechanism that caters to each individual needs has given us a great opportunity. The best channel we use is Toutiao.

So we started to build a question-and-answer platform and a self-media platform. The question-and-answer platform is mainly based on Baidu search traffic, which requires long-term content construction and tests the team's execution ability.

We can handle 150 questions and answers on the Q&A platform in a day, while more skilled people can handle 200 questions. It tests the execution level and the layout of some keywords.

In terms of self-media, we use Toutiao, which has the largest traffic, because Toutiao can quickly give a high recommendation volume, and as long as the title is long, it can obtain good traffic.

Of course, these videos will be recognized by Toutiao and the account will be blocked the next day, but it doesn’t matter. The value of this account has been used up, and you just need to buy a new account.

At that time, we had a stable supplier who could provide us with enough accounts.

flow

After we have the traffic, we need to get users to add us on WeChat. Users will not add us on WeChat actively, so we must give them a reason.

This is what you need to do when writing copy. You need to include the interests that users are concerned about in your copy.

On the Q&A platform, we can leave our contact information, which is a proof in itself, and we will mention in the copy that if you want to learn this technology, you can add our questions.

Because most people can’t achieve this effect, the keyword itself is the Internet marketing course, and if you want to master this kind of course, you can only add our WeChat.

We also do this on self-media platforms. We record the text into audio, then combine it with PPT playback or some pictures, and then generate a video and upload it to the self-media platform.

Since self-media platforms have no way to review the content of these videos and audios, we can only rely on titles and tags to distribute them to the audience we want.

In this segment of the population, we tried various methods such as online marketing, promotion, online earning, WeChat business, etc. As for the writing of titles, we also tested all the title writing methods on the Internet.

Finally I found out that besides having a good title, chance also has a lot to do with it, that is, if you make 200 videos in one night, there will always be a hit.

The titles I wrote at first were:

WeChat traffic skills, use Baidu to attract 100+ accurate fans per day

Top-secret tips for traffic generation: Knowing how to combine marketing software with vps to achieve 24-hour fully automatic traffic generation

Baidu's top-secret video has been leaked and is deleted from time to time. Watch it quickly!

To master the art of traffic generation, you must read these practical techniques!

Unlock Baidu keyword traffic generation skills video, it’s so easy to add hundreds of people a day.

The passive traffic generation technique worth tens of thousands of yuan is absolutely effective! !

You can also earn 30,000 yuan a month if you master these skills.

After seeing these top-secret techniques, you will become a marketing expert without realizing it

After our testing, the most useful title is: You can earn 30,000 yuan a month if you master these skills; after seeing these top-secret techniques, you will become a marketing expert without realizing it. Later on, our titles were basically written according to this pattern, and almost one out of every ten articles would become a hit.

So we uploaded 200 videos every day, and we really racked our brains to come up with a good title. Finally, we discovered some techniques that can create popular titles.

Therefore, when attracting users, in addition to writing good titles and copy, you also need to have interest points to give users a reason to act. This reason can be that you have touched his emotions or nerves, or you have given him a benefit to encourage users to take action.

Conversion

At the beginning of conversion and fission, we thought for a long time whether to do conversion first or fission first. In the end, we chose to do conversion first, and use the users who could not be converted for fission.

There are several situations in which users cannot be converted: users do not trust your company, users do not want to spend money, and users include both rich and poor users. Either way, you can't make him take money out of his pocket to recognize you.

Since you can't get him to pay, just occupy his circle of friends. So the fission behavior occurs. For a user who has already paid, can you still occupy his circle of friends? That's a bit too shameless.

We can use them to tap into the resources around us, rather than occupying their circle of friends. Occupying their circle of friends is a bit too cheap, which will reduce users' trust in you, and thus word of mouth and referrals will be generated.

There is a long way to go to convert users into customers. After all, this is not a product worth a few dollars that users can pay for without thinking. It is not an easy task to ask users to transfer money to you without any guarantee for something worth thousands of dollars.

Thus, trial classes came into being. The purpose of this trial class is not to teach valuable content, but to show how powerful you are so that users will be willing to pay.

Users who come to the trial class are all interested in our products, that is, they are interested in the content they are going to learn next. In the first half of the class, we let the users follow us for training. In the second half of the class, we paint a pie for the users, a pie that the users can digest, describing what the users can learn after learning and how it can help their business.

The next step is to tell the user that it is time to pay. Of course, users will not pay willingly or think about paying, so you have to create a sense of urgency for users to pay.

So we posted the price for the trial class. After the trial class ends tonight, the original registration price is 12,000, but tonight only it is 5980. In order to limit the number of students in the class, we can guide them one-on-one and implement small classes. We only recruit 40 people a month, and there are only 6 places available tonight.

Soon two people signed up, and then there were four spots left, then three, and then one spot was left every 10 minutes before the deadline. Most people signed up during these 10 minutes.

By offering discounts and a sense of urgency for places, we encourage everyone to sign up within the specified time and achieve our sales targets. This method has been proven to be effective, we have been using it for over a year and have never had any problems.

Fission

Apart from paying users, the vast majority of users in your circle of friends are free users. They occupy your friend position every day and occasionally give you a like, but they will not pay for your courses. These are the users who do not want to pay. Those users who don’t want to pay constitute your users, and those users who have paid constitute your members.

With the first batch of users, in addition to relying on channel sources, you can also split the existing users to generate more users.

Many organizations and companies want to master user fission. The premise of fission is that you have enough seed users, otherwise how can you talk about fission?

According to my experience in fission, if there are 100 seed users, basically no effect can be achieved. If you have 10,000 users, then this fission can produce good results.

When doing fission, you have to break into the user's circle of friends. Nowadays, users don't want to forward things in the circle of friends, unless the quality of the content is high enough and it touches the user's heart, they are willing to forward it automatically, or you give them a reason to forward it, that is, you must force users to have enough benefits so that they will automatically forward it.

Generally, the first style has extremely high requirements, while the second style has relatively simple requirements, so in most cases we use the second mode, and what we can use is our trial courses.

For those users who never want to spend money, each person has only one chance to try our course. If you miss it, you will have to pay a fee of 9.9. If users do not want to spend money, they can forward our poster to their friends circle. You will find that users who do not want to spend money do not want to spend a penny, so they forward the poster to their friends circle, which forms a secondary dissemination for us.

As for how to design the poster and what to write, it still depends on your understanding of the users. It is enough to design it exquisitely and impress the users. There is no need to pursue literary talent too much.

What I did was very simple. Today I forwarded a free online marketing course. One fission user can bring 200 new private domain traffic.

But in general, the value of the users who come from the fission is not high, because there is the word "free" and our courses are relatively expensive, which leads to most people coming to listen to the courses for free instead of actually paying to learn.

Referral

We cannot let go of users who have actually paid, after all, they are also a good channel, so we started a partner program. The so-called partners all use the same routine - agents!

The most important thing at this time is to establish a good agency mechanism. All they need to do is invite their own people to take trial classes. As long as the conversion is credited to the students, they can get the agency fee.

We also provide additional support for agents to help them improve their skills and abilities, and recruit students through the skills they have learned, which in turn expands our promotion staff.

You cannot expect all partners to close a deal. Among 30 partners, 20 have never closed a deal and then dropped out of the agency list. Only 5 people have placed more than two orders, only 2 people have placed more than 5 orders, and the most powerful one has placed more than 10 orders.

If we close down, we will probably still receive a lot of orders.

Cognition

As for why it finally closed, it has a lot to do with cognition.

As an operator, you cannot be obsessed with any technology. Your task is to expand the market scope, create user satisfaction, and retain more users. However, we are deeply immersed in the so-called black technology and cannot extricate ourselves, which leads to us being unable to see the big picture and ultimately failing in the changes in Internet rules.

Later, I thought about it a lot. In fact, we have tens of thousands of Civic traffic, and it is all on personal WeChat, so we can do a lot of things.

Expand the course categories. In addition to this practical and disruptive course, we can add basic e-commerce courses, private domain traffic, community gameplay, short videos and other related courses. It should be able to survive for a while.

To increase services, in addition to providing courses, we can also provide outsourcing services, such as full-network screen dominance, promotion, or website construction and software development. These services will also provide us with other income.

However, we did nothing and just watched our income go well. We did not have a deep sense of crisis and collapsed when the crisis came.

The company collapsed not because we had no money, but because the monthly income was so low that no one could make much money, especially the boss, who had little money left. The boss also asked me if I could make this happen if he gave me money to open all the bidding channels. I refused.

The boss doesn't have much money. Instead of using the money to compete with big companies, it is better to stop and work on other projects while he still has money.

So, we broke up!

It is simpler to generate private domain traffic for educational products than for other products. The key is to grasp the channels, user psychology and the wording of the copy, and you can basically get good results. If it is an educational product with a false demand, it is a different matter!

Next Friday, I will share the future operation trends from the perspective of artificial intelligence. Friends who are interested can communicate with us!

This overall review has allowed me to reconnect with my previous entrepreneurial energy. I plan to write in the next issue about the details that need to be paid attention to when starting a business from an operational perspective.

Author: Zhang Mu, Operations Officer

Source: Operations Officer Zhang Mu