Zhihu account anti-ban rules and product promotion guidelines!

1. My experience of selling products on Zhihu, from 0 to 100,000 yuan in monthly commission.

In April, my studio achieved sales of 10 million through Zhihu, with monthly commissions exceeding 100,000. For the Douyin sales team, a sales volume of 10 million is not a lot, and for Taobao bigwigs, a monthly commission of 100,000 is more than enough. But this is Zhihu, a platform that relies on text output, and we didn’t spend a penny on promotion, it’s a purely free promotion model to bring in products! During the five years that I have been working in the new media industry, although I have experienced 100,000+ hot articles and 100,000+ user growth many times, this is the first time for me to earn 100,000+ yuan by selling products on a text platform.

Although I have never been interested in the e-commerce industry, this time I feel it is particularly attractive. Mmm, it smells so good! On December 6, 2019, Zhihu’s product recommendation function had just been released for a few days. Based on my previous project experience in operating the public account matrix and the Douyin matrix, I did a one-hour live broadcast sharing of the Zhihu good products matrix in my entrepreneurial community.

I believe that many Internet people have experienced the marketing opportunities on the Zhihu platform, but this is my first time to sell products on this platform. Without data, there can be no refined operations, so the content shared at that time was the matrix gameplay.

Some people say that the matrix is ​​just moving bricks, using a large number of accounts to generate a large amount of junk content to gain platform revenue. This is indeed the matrix gameplay, but it is also the lowest level of matrix gameplay.

In my mind, a matrix refers to a set of working methods that can quickly test the feasibility of a project and whether it can be replicated and scaled up.

For example:

When we decided whether to join Douyin to sell goods, the general thinking was that women's clothing seemed to sell well, so we looked for models and photographers to shoot dozens of videos and post them. After posting them, we would spend DOU+. The testing cost was more than 100,000 yuan.

You will encounter some problems in this process. What should you do if there is no traffic after your work is published? What should I do if my work is restricted? What to do if the DOU+ input-output ratio is negative? Is there a better category than women's clothing?

If you can solve these problems with a cost of hundreds of thousands, then congratulations, you have caught the Douyin cargo number train.

But if the problem is not solved, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars would you be willing to spend on testing?

This is also the reason why many small and medium-sized players always lag behind on the Internet.

What is it like to use matrix thinking to sell products on Douyin?

First, we can test a few works of lower quality and multiple categories with multiple accounts. We don’t need to place 100 or 1,000 orders, just a few orders to determine whether this project should be done and how much money to spend.

In this process, the problems encountered are actually similar to those encountered by directly paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the cost of trial and error is reduced exponentially. Once the problem is solved, copy and expand it. If it doesn't work, buy a ticket for the next Internet train.

On the plane, everyone's destination is to go to Shenzhen to look for opportunities to get rich. If you buy a business class ticket, you may get an idea by chatting with the passenger next to you, or he may see that you are dressed in rags and disdain to talk to you. This is your only chance to go to Shenzhen.

Playing the matrix is ​​equivalent to buying economy class. The people around you will not provide you with any useful information. You need to walk all over Shenzhen after getting off the plane. If you don’t find opportunities this time, there will be many opportunities next time you come to Shenzhen.

Since the Spring Festival, the global economy has been greatly affected. The plans that were communicated with several companies before the New Year have basically been stopped. Business owners are having a hard time, and our studio, which provides new media marketing planning for business owners, is naturally not doing much better.

So I used matrix thinking and my colleagues at work to go all in on Zhihu's product recommendations, from the initial 3 accounts to the current 12 accounts (3 of which were permanently banned in the middle).

The product categories include clothing, shoes and bags, digital appliances, daily necessities, home furnishings, skin care and beauty, etc., and the monthly commission for each account is more than 10,000.

The following is a screenshot of the earnings of some new accounts in April:

This year's small goal is to open 100 accounts, increase the commission output of the order number, and strive to obtain monthly commissions as soon as possible.

100W results.

Regarding the project staffing: 1 full-time copywriter, 1 part-time copywriter, 1 data analyst and optimizer, and 1 product selector. I am responsible for organizing daily meetings to review the situation, urging them to write articles and make reports, as well as coordinating with other studio collaborations. If you still don’t know what I’m doing after reading this, it doesn’t matter. Next, I will write out the entire process of the Zhihu live streaming project one by one.

2. What are Zhihu’s good product recommendations? Why should you promote products on Zhihu?

Product recommendations are an official function provided by Zhihu for the platform's creators to realize their e-commerce monetization. The more monetization methods the creators have or the higher the profits, the more people will be attracted to create more valuable content for the platform. It can be understood as WeChat’s micro-store, Douyin’s shopping cart, and Weibo’s small store.

From the comparison of user consumption between Douyin and Zhihu, we can find that:

Douyin users are impulse buyers, purchasing products through 15-second videos or several minutes of live broadcasts. Their consumption decision-making time is short, and they are suitable for products with a unit price of less than 200 yuan. If the average customer price exceeds 200 yuan, the data will drop sharply. Currently, there are two types of top players in Douyin’s live streaming sales: those using big IPs (Luo Yonghao, Li Jiaqi, etc.) and those using paid traffic (consuming huge amounts of DOU+ and Luban fees through continuous product selection and work optimization). Zhihu users are rational consumers. Before buying, they will read a lot of relevant articles and make their own purchasing decisions. The products they are willing to spend a lot of time selecting are generally more expensive, and may cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Currently, there are two types of top players in Zhihu selling products: big V selling products (KOLs in a vertical field who joined Zhihu earlier) and matrix selling products.

In summary, we can conclude the benefits of bringing goods on Zhihu:

1. It has been less than half a year since Zhihu platform started to engage in large-scale e-commerce monetization. Currently, it is a blue ocean with relatively little competition.

2. The products sold on Zhihu are not restricted by the average order value and are suitable for the promotion of all product categories.

3. The cost of text creation is lower than that of video works, and the traffic distribution is reasonable. It only considers the quality of the content regardless of how much promotion cost is invested.

The process of bringing goods on a single Zhihu account is as follows:

Register an account to activate the Good Product function → select products → write product recommendations → optimize creation data → earn income.

3. Zhihu Account Anti-Ban Guide

Do you still remember the eight-character principles that your parents often told you? Wear more clothes! be safe! This is how it is when working on an Internet project. Under the premise of legality, you must pay attention to the security of your account. It doesn't matter if there are no results, but don't make some achievements but get blocked and be left with endless sighs. My studio mates sighed three times while sitting around the conference table!

Any money-making project follows the 80/20 rule: 20% of people eat the meat and the rest drink the soup. I entered this project relatively early, so naturally I wanted to eat the meat and leave the soup for the rest of us. But the meat is not tasty and might damage your teeth.

The account was blocked for no other reason than competition from peers. Although the answers previously made are still there and the income will continue, the traffic will gradually decrease until there is no income at all.

Let me use this real example to tell you how to prevent being blocked.

1. Do not reprint in any form!

01) I initially maintained this account myself. In order to quickly develop it, I posted some wallpapers and beautiful sentences. The effect was naturally good, and I quickly met the requirements for activating good product recommendations. However, this also laid the seeds for it to be blocked later. In fact, there are a lot of such answers on Zhihu, and many of them are popular, but you can't resist your peers finding fault and reporting you for illegal reprinting. Strictly speaking, there is indeed suspicion of illegal reprinting.

02) One sentence was blocked for 7 days due to incorrect citation method. At that time, because I was too lazy to type, I copied and pasted a definition from Baidu Encyclopedia and added quotation marks, but it was this sentence that caused this account to violate the rules for the second time. At that time, I thought that there was no copyright issue with Baidu Encyclopedia, so I added quotation marks. Everyone on Zhihu also quoted in this way.

2. Pseudo-originality will also violate the rules! What to do if you are not familiar with a new field? At that time, I was thinking of a pseudo-original work. Of course, my pseudo-original work would not be visible at a glance like a newbie, and there were differences in many places. However, the final result was beyond my expectation, and it was reported as an illegal reproduction.

3. Original works will also be disgusting! I was really disgusted by my colleagues some time ago. My purely original articles and answers were illegally reposted on other platforms by others, and then they were successfully reported. I was completely confused at the time. Although the appeal is successful, the violation record will not be deleted and will be accumulated for the next violation.

How to solve the above problems?

1. Weight is important! The account has high weight, strong anti-blocking ability, and reporting is easier to succeed!

2. Remember to become a member, preferably with an annual fee. Your appeal will be easier to approve and the butler will reply faster. If you feel that the customer service review is unfair, you can also complain to the customer service.

3. Your work should be purely original and cite as little as possible. Even if the citation format is correct, it is not recommended as it may be considered disgusting!

4. Don’t send spam ads! Spam advertising is not just about attracting traffic. If you only promote one product, it is easy to be reported as spam advertising. If you keep copying and pasting the original answer, it may also be judged as spam advertising!

4. What does a high-output Zhihu product account look like?

Focus on 1~2 areas!

There are many big Vs on Zhihu who are also creating good things on Zhihu. They may only focus on one field. Why? Regarding the mechanism of Zhihu, when I first tried to do it, the fields were quite diverse and I wrote a little bit about everything. When I found that something was selling well, I started to focus on one field and improve my personal weight. One area here is to focus on making one thing, a big product, such as making a toilet. You only make toilets and toilet peripherals, and make them refined and to the extreme. In this way, when you answer a question, if it is a small question with tens of thousands of views, you will be directly ahead of others, sometimes even ranked first. If it is a big question with hundreds of thousands or even millions of views, the ranking will also be very high. And when you focus on 1-2 areas, you will become more and more professional. At the beginning, you may just have to push it hard, and whether you can sell it or not really depends on luck.

Later, when you become more professional, it will be very easy to write articles and answers. Gradually, you will start to encounter people who privately message you to inquire about related products. This means that your professionalism has been recognized to a certain extent. At the same time, you should also increase your knowledge reserves, understand the products you are promoting, and try to choose better products. Even if others complain about your recommendations, you will still not be in vain.

It is important to pay more attention to the big guys in the same field and learn the knowledge from their articles. Don't let people think you are a newbie (even if you are). The answers to questions and articles also mentioned not to force pushes and just throw a dozen links. So why don't others go directly to JD.com to read?

For example, there is a big guy named Lan on Zhihu who focuses on the television field. He regards this as his personal career, not a side job, and writes very professionally. It is impossible to learn it completely unless you are also a professional, but we want to be similar. Learn more about how others respond to others' comments and interact with each other, and then summarize the style that suits you best. Don't just learn.

I wrote an article before and it became a small hit. It was originally written with the psychological purpose of pushing it hard, but looking back on it, I think it was written in a very simple and easy-to-understand way. In fact, many people are also novices like you and don’t understand it either. So you should try to write in a professional and practical way so that others can understand it and think you are more professional than them.

If someone comments, interact more with them, which can also increase the weight of your own field. Product selection is very important when recommending products. You really have to choose products with higher commissions. New products or products from flagship stores usually have higher commissions than self-operated products. If you find a new high-commission link, you can replace the original old link in time. Otherwise, if you work hard for a long time and only a few models make a few cents, it’s meaningless and you can’t even get back your capital.

5. How to quickly find issues that can be solved?

It is too tiring to find problems one by one. When you have already gone through all the problems in the previous row, you need to find new problems. At this time, you can use Houyi Collector to collect problems and set the collection parameters.

1. First search for the product in the Zhihu search bar and copy the URL to the collector.

2. Click on a link to an answer at random. If you find it is an article, delete it and choose another one.

At this time, the interface will jump to the data page you need to collect.

3. Set the data that needs to be collected. Add one more field for each data that needs to be collected. You can also filter the data, for example, not collecting questions with less than 100 views.

After saving, click Start Collection. The background will automatically collect data for you and stop automatically after the collection is completed. At this time, you can export the data and filter it. There will be links to Zhihu questions in it. You can directly copy them to the browser to view them.

5. You can directly right-click on the data being collected, and choose to view the data. At this time, you can see the data you have collected, and you can also export the data directly. Select the saved location to open it.

6. Enter the exported data table, select the first row and click the filter button.

Because of the numerical display of Zhihu, the collected numbers may not be recognizable. In this case, select all the numbers, click the yellow exclamation mark, and convert them to numbers. Then you can view the views in ascending or descending order.

6. How to maintain Zhihu Good Things account?

Maintenance is more important than updating! In the field where you have already tested and are able to place orders, start with small problems worth a few thousand or tens of thousands and with less competition from peers, and slowly accumulate your own weight. Regular maintenance is required every day, mainly analyzing data from various aspects such as ranking, answer views, reading volume, etc., to find out the answers with the highest reading volume, and then check the order rate (which can be viewed in the Creator Center).

For some questions, the reading volume is very high, but the order rate is relatively low or zero. Issues with high order rates require special maintenance. You can make a table and record it every day to prevent malicious competition from stepping on your issues and maintain your own ranking. If you are indeed stepped on, you must make timely remedial measures.

These problems can also be seen from the decline in data. During the 5 months of promoting products on Zhihu, I am quite satisfied with the results I have achieved. I am also very grateful to my partners in the studio for trusting me and being willing to work with me on a new project. Of course, their respective salary levels have all reached 15,000 yuan per month. The first group of community members who listened to the content I shared in the internal group and implemented it received commission income ranging from several thousand to tens of thousands per month.

Author: The Road to Heaven

Source: Bu Tian Zhi Lu (ID: BTojbk)