Talk about the traffic monetization of self-media

I posted an advertisement two days ago about a cervical massage device.

Some readers don’t like the idea of ​​self-media advertising, while some readers are not used to it. I think it doesn’t matter. I won’t talk about specific advertisements today. Today, based on this introduction, I will talk about my thoughts on the monetization of self-media traffic .

1. Attitude towards data

I prefer to review some of the things I have done and am willing to share some of my data, such as my advertising revenue, my Knowledge Planet revenue, and the number of participants in the online courses I have taught. There are many similar sharings in the old articles.

Some people think you are just bragging as usual, some people think it's just the author being old and nagging, but some people will like to see these data.

Frankly, I love looking at these numbers.

I often sneak a peek to ask some big Vs about their latest advertising quotes.

I often keep an eye on the weekly wealth list of the Knowledge Planet, evaluate the rate of return of the top planets, and sneak a peek to ask certain star owners where their user traffic comes from.

I often keep an eye on the distribution list of Geek Time. Not only do I look at the overall list, but I also pay attention to the list of each specific course to evaluate the conversion rate of different courses led by different big Vs. I will take the initiative to flirt with anyone who is high on the list.

I will also ask around for public accounts that do insurance business to find out their specific profits.

I also checked the approximate rate of return of the shopping malls opened by Lian Yue, Keso and others on their official accounts.

When I first opened my official account, I asked several big Vs about the average income from appreciation.

Of course, I have also been keeping an eye on the transfer prices of public accounts on the A5 platform and the monthly income capabilities announced by those account owners.

Well, last month I was very concerned about the distribution ranking data of Yiren Shengcai Youshu.

Of course, I can roughly understand some of the above data, but not some of them. But even if I know them, I will not tell you. Only my own data can be shared.

Why do I care about this.

Starting from the design of advertising systems, it has been mentioned here that the core demand of commercial product analysts is to focus on the efficiency of traffic monetization.

However, there is a large amount of information gap on the topic of traffic monetization efficiency.

When I was working on alliance products and business analysis at Baidu, I came into contact with a lot of data. The information asymmetry arbitrage here was extremely crazy more than ten years ago. Smart people would buy traffic from webmasters who didn't know how to monetize, and then resell it for three or five times the arbitrage. For example, Hua Jun Software Park, which is well-known to older netizens, has been plundered by others in such a crazy way. Hua Jun is really an honest man.

In the era of self-media, does information asymmetry arbitrage still exist? I can tell you for sure that it still exists, and it is widespread, for example, well, it’s hard to say.

I share my data and cases in the hope of helping young people who are willing to engage in self-media or are interested in this field. For these people, the data itself is of great value, because many people are unwilling to share, and even if they are willing to share, they often do not tell the truth.

In addition to caring about the data, I care more about the people behind it.

I have visited many newcomers in the field of knowledge payment and self-media, such as stormzhang, Zhou Zuoluo, Banfoxianren, Daojie, etc., and of course there are also those who take the initiative to contact me. If I learn somewhere that someone has a very high conversion efficiency for a certain knowledge-based paid product, I will usually take the initiative to add the other party on WeChat and then arrange time to visit as appropriate.

As a person born in the 1970s, why am I not too outdated with the latest traffic intelligence in the industry, and why my connections in the industry are not limited to the older generation’s circle? The secret lies here. It is not uncommon for industry leaders born in the 1970s to know a few upstart entrepreneurs born in the 1990s. But there are actually not many people like me who know so many, and they are all very good, because these are the best ones I have screened using data.

Let me tell you a real case. There was a young man born in the 1990s who took the initiative to talk to me in Shanghai. I treated him to a meal. I don’t want to reveal who he is. He started writing technical self-media purely out of interest. For a long time, he didn’t even know how much advertising fees he could earn. To be honest, he was not an influential big V, nor a very strong original author. He had only tens of thousands of fans at the time. But when he understood the revenue of self-media advertising, that is, when he had an idea of ​​the efficiency of traffic monetization, he decided to make a full effort to do this, and based on the core goals, he established his own unique approach. Without any capital investment, he can now achieve a stable monthly income of around 300,000. To be honest, I was a little surprised, because frankly, his background is not that strong, and his writing ability is not that strong. I cannot reveal his playing style, but it is simple and crude, but effective.

2. The story behind the advertisement

In fact, many people have mentioned similar views. I don’t remember who they were, maybe Gu Xiaobei, Yiren or Lao Hu, or all of them. The point is that for entrepreneurs, or for those who are interested in increasing their business thinking and want to engage in side jobs, paying attention to advertising is a very important thing, because by observing advertising you can understand many business principles and business opportunities.

Let me give you an example. Many people will encounter certain advertisements when scrolling through their information streams, such as special offers on leather shoes, handbags, and some electronic products. The brands are ones they have never heard of, but they claim to be of high quality and have beautiful pictures.

Some people were attracted and placed an order.

Some people were not interested and cancelled.

Do you know what would happen if an old hand saw such an advertisement frequently?

Go to Pinduoduo and 1688 and search immediately to find out how much similar items sell for.

I have said before that if a product advertisement appears frequently in the information flow, and you cannot find any investment and financing news, it must mean that the product currently has a very high profit margin.

Generally, there are two purposes of advertising.

One is to buy users and spend money to build influence, and then rely on continued financing for development, such as the shared bicycles in the past, which had overwhelming advertising. In this way, you will find a lot of industry news, various press releases and financing news every day. So you can easily tell that the purpose of this is influence.

One is to make money simply and straightforwardly. There are very few news about this kind of thing, and if there is any, it is all aimed at consumers rather than industry insiders. Why? They make money quietly, and it is best if industry insiders don't know about it.

A few days ago, a user of the Planet raised a particularly interesting question. He said that on unspeakable websites like Pornhub, advertisements are all about gambling, adult dating, etc. Why don’t regular products consider placing advertisements on such unspeakable websites?

I think you have got the problem wrong. It's not that regular products don't consider advertising here, but under the same traffic conditions, various black and gray industries have higher monetization efficiency. In this case, regular products have no bidding advantage!

In fact, if you observe the advertisements on Weibo, you will see all kinds of scams and gray market advertisements everywhere. Do you think regular products don’t advertise on Weibo? No, compared with scammers, legitimate products have no bidding advantage. Baidu certainly has similar problems. So, when you say that the advertisements of some giants are very clean, it is actually due to control. If there is no control, black and gray industries will still be rampant. In some countries, the relevant laws and regulations are strict and the penalties are huge, so the giants will be much more honest. The penalties in some countries are not severe, so the giants will be more lenient. If there is no control, everyone is actually the same. The keyword leaked in my old article, FB cloak, is actually, ahem, not appropriate to talk about it again.

In a fully bidding field, products with high traffic monetization efficiency will grab the most traffic resources. This is also what traffic player Yang Tao mentioned before, that traffic will eventually find the most efficient outlet for monetization.

3. My attempt

Earlier last year, my assistant often rejected many types of advertisements. For a while, I found that the advertisers who came to me were limited to a few online course platforms. I asked if there were no other advertisers looking for me. Later, the assistant said no, he felt they were not suitable, so he turned them all down.

I. . .

Later I asked him to respect my right to make the decision.

So what is my goal? I make money from my own media, but I also think it is a very interesting testing platform. I can test a lot of things, including the efficiency of monetization of different types of traffic.

Of course, this test is based on a basic premise, which is that I cannot harm my readers and cannot recommend products that I think are inappropriate. I still insist on this point.

Selling online courses, what is the monetization efficiency?

When selling insurance, what is the cash conversion efficiency?

Pushing the planet, what is the monetization efficiency.

I don’t dare to touch financial products, but Futu Securities is at least safe and reliable, so I’d give it a try.

So what about selling goods?

Actually, I have talked to an e-commerce platform before, and the boss personally arranged a contact person for me to help me operate and maintain the online store. I'm sorry that I didn't try it in the end. The solution they gave me was actually very good. I didn't have to worry about anything, and they handled the daily after-sales. They produced 2 to 5 contents for the official account every day, and I just posted them. The first one was still my own article, and then I collected commissions.

It sounds really good, and then I took a closer look at the products. The most popular products with the highest commissions sold by various big Vs are all kinds of health products. If they are multivitamins, fish oil, Q10, etc., I think they are okay and can still be promoted. But they are not. They are all kinds of traditional Chinese medicine health products that boast of magical effects, which I really cannot accept. Forget it, it’s better not to make this money.

Diversified attempts can also be considered as exploring the most efficient way to monetize traffic.

4. The cost of trying

Every attempt has a cost, and the cost of self-media advertising is the unfollow rate.

In fact, how do we look at the topic of unfollow rate? My point is, first determine what the denominator is.

For example, I have 390,000 followers. I posted an advertisement for a massager, and I noticed that about 400 users unfollowed me. It seems to be only one thousandth, which seems insignificant. I don’t think it should be calculated that way. I posted an ad, and only 16,000 people visited it. (The number of visits to advertisements is usually only half of that of original articles, because there are much fewer forwardings and re-readings. Basically, there is only one visit from a direct open, and there is almost no secondary dissemination.) So if there are 400 unfollows for 16,000 visits, this ratio is not low, at 2.5%.

Why does it count like this? If you don’t open it, then you haven’t unfollowed it, right? To be honest, the readers who open your article directly from the information flow are definitely more valuable than those who don’t, right? In terms of long-term value or probability, the average frequency of these unfollowed users opening your article will be significantly higher than that of other readers who have not currently opened your article, right?

If you calculate it this way, the cost is actually quite high. It's definitely not the kind of calculation that you use to just spend money to buy fans outside.

So many times, when we say that self-media should be cautious when posting advertisements, it is not only due to moral and responsibility reasons, but also cost considerations. If the unfollow rate is too high, the advertising revenue may not be able to make up for the loss, because you will continue to lose readership, and this value is long-term.

5. Thoughts on continuing to sell products

To be honest, I am not a top influencer, nor am I good at marketing. I admit that it is unlikely that I will become a top sales expert, so I do not think I have ultimate bargaining power.

As for the price of the massager, to be honest, there are many other channels where you can get the same price. I can only say that among all the officially authorized channels, my price will not be more expensive than others for the same model, but to be honest, there is no special price advantage. (Some readers have seen the official low prices of different models of the same brand, which cannot be directly compared.)

As for non-official authorized channels, there are actually many very low prices. For this kind of thing, I can only say that it is impossible to evaluate the authenticity, so I dare not touch it.

Since I started selling goods, some merchants did come to me, so I positioned myself

First, I dare not touch products that cannot ensure quality control. I really dare not. I am a timid person and do not want to cause after-sales disputes.

Second, I will not recommend a product that I would not buy myself.

For example, a niche clothing brand recently asked me about its quality. I looked at the price and it was a light luxury style. As a stingy person born in the 1970s, I generally don’t spend too much money on clothes. Anyway, I myself would not consume such products. I can’t say that it is bad, but I will not recommend such products, and I don’t think my readers will be keen on pursuing such consumer products.

I can still recommend products that I would not buy due to some objective reasons. For example, I live in Singapore and it is impossible for me to buy a car in China. However, if some car brands that I recognize have big promotions, I am willing to try to recommend them.

Third, don’t pursue the ultimate price.

I believe in my readers' trust in me, so as long as it is not more expensive than others, I believe many readers will place orders with me. But as to whether it will be cheaper than others, I don't think I really have the bargaining power.

Fourth, the publicity must be consistent with my values.

Many people use celebrity endorsements when recommending massagers. Why don’t I use them? I never think that celebrity endorsements can prove anything, but I approve of Dingxiang Doctor’s promotion because I know that Dingxiang Doctor has a bottom line. They will not recommend products that doctors do not approve of, and they will not recommend pseudoscientific products in the medical field.

So actually some manufacturers and merchants have asked me recently, but frankly speaking, it is not easy to pick a suitable one according to my standards. But if there is a suitable one, I would still be willing to try it. It is a very interesting thing to try to diversify traffic monetization.

It is important to do things within your means. Someone said that Teacher Cao, you should customize a product specifically for fans, and the manufacturer here will cooperate. I said forget it, I'm not that big a star, I can consider doing some small benefits, such as customizing a pair of playing cards with golden quotes from articles or something, I don't expect to make money, it's also nice to give out lucky draws from time to time. That’s all. If you try to do anything bigger, you’ll be overestimating your capabilities and will be beaten by reality.

Finally, I’m sorry that this article doesn’t share much data.

The merchant has not provided me with the sales data yet. I will share it with readers as appropriate after I get it in a few days. However, the initial feedback seems to be good. There was an episode that I didn't expect. I didn't realize the 5.20 thing. As a result, many people didn't know what gifts to give to their partners. I really didn't take this kind of day seriously.

I will still try different possibilities and look for more valuable traffic commercial conversion paths as appropriate.

I hope that readers can better understand the ways and efficiency of traffic monetization, as well as the significance of increasing traffic monetization efficiency. If you understand traffic monetization efficiency better than others, in other words, you have grasped the opportunities and possibilities of traffic arbitrage. There are actually many such cases! I was just about to give a few more typical examples, but then I thought, forget it. A lot of the information that you just glance over in your daily life actually contains arbitrage operations. Forget it, they are all people in my circle of friends, and I will get beaten if I tell them about it.

So when you say this article doesn’t reveal anything, isn’t that nonsense?

Going back to the beginning, I mentioned a lot of data that I care about, and I said I would not share it with you, but have you ever thought about searching and verifying it yourself?

For example,

Have you ever studied the distribution list data of GeekBang?

Can we observe the income data and continuous trends of some typical big V knowledge planets, and how can we observe them?

A5 contains various transfer information, but as an industry observer, what valuable information can you observe? In addition, there is Xinbang and Qingbo. Seeing different values ​​from common information is the basic skill of business acumen , which cannot be taught.

A lot of this is public information. Do you want me to share it with you?

If you think the above is all nonsense, forget it and just unfollow me.

The title image comes from Huang Bo's "Crazy Racing"

Interpretation: For people with different traffic values, sometimes, traffic in their hands is equivalent to playing with US dollars.

Author: Caoz's Dream

Source: Caoz's Dream Talk (ID: caozsay )