A single article brought in over 2,000 products. It only took me one month to realize it on Zhihu.

As a highly active community website in China, Zhihu has more than half of the industry's high-quality users. Whether they are many working people or college students, most people are accustomed to searching in the Zhihu community to get the answers they want when searching for questions.

For self-media, Zhihu has undoubtedly become a very important traffic-generating platform in the minds of many people. According to the official data released by Zhihu in 2018, the daily active users of the community website exceeded 30 million in 2018, and it is estimated to have more than doubled now. By posting articles and competing for rankings on the platform, you can attract traffic to your official account and other media and increase followers.

In June, I started operating a previous Zhihu account. Actually, this account had not been operated before, and it had only been updated sporadically. In mid-June, I started formal operations. In one month, I upgraded from V3 to V6, gained more than 1,500 followers, and attracted more than 100 high-quality fans to WeChat.

Let me share with you some of my experiences and suggestions, mainly from the following four dimensions:

1. Account maintenance

2. Operation

3. Drainage

4. Monetization

I won’t say much nonsense, let’s get straight to the point:

Account maintenance

1. Complete all information

Complete all Zhihu account information, such as profile, industry, introduction, professional experience, etc. Try not to miss out on anything that can be filled in, especially the avatar. If you can't find a suitable picture as your avatar, it is recommended to use the fox icon from Zhihu's Liu Kanshan series, which can also serve as an endorsement.

In addition, it is best to bind your email address and mobile phone number to your account to facilitate retrieval later.

2. Visit the community every day

After the account is created, it is recommended that you do not rush to post articles and operate it. You can leave it for a few days. During these days, you should mainly browse Zhihu every day and read more topics and articles.

During this period of time, you can also collect some of your favorite topics and the direction of your account, so that you can update the content directly when the time comes.

3. Build a community, like, comment, and interact in a friendly manner

The most intuitive way for Zhihu to evaluate a piece of content is through likes + comments . While maintaining your account, you can interact more while browsing topics, like and comment on some high-quality content, and you can also grab some high-ranking answers on the comment list. These positions actually have a certain amount of traffic, and you may be able to retain and increase your followers.

4. Report three unauthorized accounts

A Zhihu account has a balanced weighted score, which is the personal salt value of Zhihu. The higher the salt value, the more benefits you will get.

Likes, comments and interactions as we just mentioned are helpful in improving the salt value. In addition to this, it can also help Zhihu officials find some low-quality, three-no small accounts. These accounts are generally registered in batches to attract traffic. Some of them don’t even have avatar introductions, but are directly registered. You can report them to the official after discovering them.

There is also another situation where some accounts post inappropriate content in the community, such as insults, swear words, and uncomfortable content. These can be discovered and reported directly.

After a successful report, the official will add points to the personal account from the perspective of building a community, thereby increasing the salt value.

5. Complete the certification

Authentication is relatively simple. To put it simply, it is to add a blue V identity.

Zhihu can authenticate both institutional and personal accounts. After registering an institutional account, a certification service fee of 300 is required.

Your personal account can be directly authenticated with your employment certificate or academic certificate .

operations

1. Answer as many topics as possible to increase exposure

Zhihu is essentially a question-and-answer community that mainly screens some high-quality questions, and then the platform gives certain topic traffic recommendations so that more relevant people can see them and answer them, and the content is included.

Generally, when question-and-answer communities like this are first launched, because there are not enough registered users and there is not enough content in the community, internal company employees will ask and answer their own questions, register a batch of accounts, and then frantically post topics in the community, and then switch accounts to answer them.

Although Zhihu also publishes article content sections, relatively speaking, the same article does not bring as much traffic as a high-hot topic.

But that doesn’t mean the article won’t have traffic recommendations, that’s definitely not the case. There are also many big guys who have brought themselves a large number of fans and attention just by publishing articles. If you are posting an article, you can embed more popular keywords in the title and article, so that they will have a higher chance of being displayed in the search interface.

2. Search for appropriate topics by keywords

Each platform will have its own operating mechanism and some positioning for accounts. Each account should be continuously explored vertically in a niche field.

After positioning the account, what we need to do is to find some topics that are suitable for us and have high traffic and follow to answer and post. It is recommended that you search for keywords in your industry on keyword websites such as 5118 or Baidu Index, filter out words with traffic, switch to the Zhihu community for search, and then see the popularity of this topic on the platform.

One thing to note is that Zhihu has a very high weight in Baidu. Basically, the content posted on Zhihu can be quickly captured and included by Baidu crawlers, so some keywords will become very important here.

3. Refresh the page to see the popularity

After finding a suitable topic, another very important point is whether this topic is popular in Zhihu. If the topic itself does not bring traffic and few people browse it, then even if your content is very informative, it will be of no use.

I usually find a suitable topic and then look at how many views it has received. If it has more than 5,000 views, then it basically makes sense to answer it. However, because the views of some topics are accumulated because the topic itself has been published for a long time, we still need to judge whether the topic is still popular. The simplest way is to refresh the page every few minutes to see how the page views change. If it continues to update, it means that this topic is still quite popular.

4. High-quality content + pictures

Once you have decided on the topic, you can start answering it. Although Zhihu is a question-and-answer community, you should not just answer a question casually with a few sentences and call it a day. No one will pay attention to you if you do that.

For the answer to a question, the more detailed the answer is, the better. But there are so many community topics. Here I suggest that if a topic has less than 5,000 views, you can just briefly answer a few core sentences. Just make the general direction clear. If the number of views exceeds 5,000 and there is still traffic recommendation, then you can write it as an article. The more detailed you write, the higher the ranking will be in the future.

My suggestion is that each article should be accompanied by three pictures, because you can also add "alt" in the picture attributes, and write two keywords in this place. If Baidu includes the pictures, others can also click on the pictures on the Baidu picture website to enter the article.

In addition, pictures can also better display individual users' views and attract them to click into the topic.

5. Cold Start

I think this can be divided into two parts. One is the cold start when the topic is just released. One is the stability of the ranking in the later period.

Let’s talk about cold start first. Zhihu has an algorithm called Wilson algorithm. That is, for some newly released content, your likes and comments will be viewed in the first few minutes. For example, if a newly published answer can receive 10 or more likes within 20 minutes, Zhihu will determine that the content is valuable, give it a certain amount of traffic recommendation, and also move the topic ranking forward.

That’s why there are so many Zhihu mutual likes groups on WeChat now, everyone is trying to accumulate points and rush for rankings. But generally speaking, for mutual likes, you need to like others’ posts first before you can receive the corresponding likes. It is recommended that you create two small accounts, maintain them, and then like other people’s posts, and then receive the likes with the main account.

Or you can just send a red envelope every time you ask for likes in the group, because mutual likes have a bit of the meaning of brushing likes, which is actually not allowed by the Zhihu official website. In addition, at the end of July, Zhihu rectified its platform and banned a large number of accounts that had engaged in fraudulent likes, including many big accounts. So if you can avoid the suspicion of cheating, try to avoid it.

The second one is actually about the actions after the cold start . If your answer pushes up the ranking during the cold start, you should continue to stabilize the ranking and prevent it from falling.

If a post only gets a surge of likes when it is first published, but no more likes are received later on, its ranking will continue to be pushed down by other content.

So what we can do is to update the answers to some hot topics every once in a while, and then like each other so that they can receive continuous and stable likes and maintain a good ranking.

If this was done a month or two ago, you could use some tools to collect likes. Some companies in the circle have developed tools specifically for mutual likes. You just need to put your account up, and there will be a lot of answers on it. When you like someone else's post, you can receive the same corresponding like in return. However, due to previous community rectification, these tools are currently unavailable, and long-term use will be considered as plug-ins to increase likes.

6. Update 4-5 articles per week and keep updating

As long as you work hard, there will always be rewards.

The creation level of Zhihu is partly judged based on the daily activity of the account. If the account can steadily receive a certain amount of likes, likes, and interactions every day, then the level will rise quickly with continuous stability. Of course, the most important thing is to produce stable content for publication every day. The daily update of the account will have a lot of determining factors on the increase in level experience.

In June, I updated continuously for more than half a month, and then added some community building and operations, and I directly rose two levels in two weeks.

Therefore, once you start operating, try to maintain a stable content production. It is not necessary to update daily, but try to keep 4-5 pieces of content released every week. If you fish for three days and then rest for two days, then there won't be much difference in terms of followers or level experience points.

drainage

After briefly talking about some operational skills of Zhihu, let’s talk about traffic generation.

I believe that most people who use Zhihu have a common purpose, which is to attract traffic and increase followers to other platforms. The mainstream is to acquire customers for official accounts or personal WeChat accounts.

But each platform has its own rules. You cannot blatantly divert traffic. Once discovered by the authorities or reported by other users, your account is likely to be blocked. Zhihu usually bans accounts for 1 day, then 7 days, 1 month, and then permanently. Therefore, it is better to take it as slow as possible, after all, you are digging into the traffic of other platforms.

Here I share some drainage locations and methods that I have tried, you can refer to them:

1. Home page introduction

Regardless of the platform, personal introduction is generally the most important place for attracting traffic, because in addition to being displayed on your own homepage, as long as you interact in other places, the account avatar and introduction will also be directly displayed. For target customers, they can only see it directly, which is more intuitive and saves the step of clicking on the homepage.

2. Home page background cover

In addition to the introduction, the cover background is also the most important place for traffic to the homepage.

You can make a picture yourself, put some information or logic diagram on it, and then put your own WeChat account or public account on it, and you can also make an exposure display. Compared with text, images are less likely to be searched as advertisements. It’s just that compared to introduction, it won’t have such a big advantage. After all, others can only see it through your articles or by searching your account name. But it is still good for attracting fans to the platform. You can use materials or courses as bait to divert traffic across platforms.

One thing that needs to be noted is that, as we said before, reporting some advertisements and vulgar accounts is also a way to increase the salt value. In addition, there are some trolls in the Zhihu community itself who do nothing but look for topics to argue.

Therefore, although the background image of the homepage will not be easily retrieved by the official, it may be suspected of being an advertisement if it encounters reports from competitors or other users. So for this content, try not to be too direct. You can use it as a bait to guide him to send you a private message and then add you on WeChat.

3. End of article guidance

One very obvious difference between Zhihu articles and topics is that articles cannot contain any content that may be suspected of diverting traffic , especially placing WeChat accounts or public accounts at the end of the article.

But relatively speaking, the answers to the topics are not that strict. Generally, some traffic-generating keywords can be embedded in the topics, and some screenshots of information can be placed at the end of the answers to serve as bait to attract people to add WeChat or public accounts.

I usually just put a sentence at the end to introduce and follow the official account .

However, some friends also reported that they had only posted content to attract traffic to the topic, but it was also deleted. Regarding this issue, I think it is because your promotion is too direct and obvious, which is why you were reported.

For example, the entire content of your answer is about promoting your official account, or you have mentioned words like following the official account in multiple places. When other users see these contents, they come here to find solutions to their problems, but in the end all they see are advertisements. Some extreme users will definitely report them on the spot.

Of course, there is another factor that will have an impact, that is the weight of the account. Accounts with high weights are generally not very strict with the authorities and will have some advantages relatively speaking.

There are actually some other places where you can attract traffic, such as the introduction of the homepage, and putting the WeChat ID or public account in the comments. These places can actually be used for promotion, but relatively speaking, the exposure of these places will not be very large, and users will basically not specifically open them and then add them to follow. However, if your topic answer is officially recommended and is once on the hot list, there will still be traffic in the comments.

Monetization

After all, all efforts are made for commercialization and to provide yourself with an additional monetization channel. If you concentrate on researching a certain direction but ultimately fail to monetize it, then it may not be of much significance to most people, and Zhihu is no exception.

Currently, there are two main ways for Zhihu to monetize its platform. One is to provide paid consulting, and the other is Zhihu Goodies.

Paid consultation is very simple. When your Zhihu salt value reaches 500, you can open the paid consultation entrance in the account settings. After activation, it will be displayed on your homepage. At this time, if a customer browses you and has questions, he will pay directly for consultation. Of course, freeloaders are everywhere, and many people directly send private messages to get free stuff. It is recommended that when someone sends a private message, if it involves some core issues, you can ask them to pay and then answer.

Activation process: Open the Zhihu APP on your mobile phone - enter the My interface and click Paid Consultation - then click My Consultation - turn on the paid consultation switch and the personal page consultation entrance.

Let's talk about Zhihu's good stuff :

In 2019, Zhihu launched the Zhihu Good Products feature, conducted internal testing of the first batch of user recommendations, and directly contracted the Zhihu CPS cooperation with two e-commerce platforms, Taobao Tmall and JD.com.

All functions are now open, and any creator who has registered at level 3 or above can start selling content. The person who promotes products can use his or her professional expertise to select good products from among the good products, write a targeted product recommendation or review and publish it. Of course, if someone browses the community and clicks on your link and buys the product, you can get a commission. Those who are good in the circle can earn hundreds or thousands of dollars in commissions in a day.

Moreover, for content like this that drives sales, if you have sufficient content in the early stages and cover a large enough area, as long as the official recommends one or two highly popular posts, you basically only need to carry out maintenance and updates and earn income without doing anything.

Currently, many of the earliest people in the circle who started to use Zhihu’s good things have begun to provide training , charging several thousand yuan for each student. This is also a way of monetization derived from the platform.

Previously, I was invited by a brand to write a review for them to promote their products. I also posted the review with a few links embedded in it, and it has generated more than 2,000 in sales so far .

I will simply share with you a few key points about how to play Zhihu Good Things. Some details will not be elaborated here, and we can discuss this separately later.

• 1. Article keyword superposition to help search display
• 2. Highly popular keywords are embedded in the title
• 3. Publish articles in multiple areas on topics that match product attributes
• 4. Cold start, refer to the above cold start content
• 5. Multiple accounts work together

In addition, Zhihu also has a live broadcast function, which is similar to Kuaishou and Douyin. Live broadcast can be used to increase the number of followers of the account and receive gifts. At present, the traffic on this platform has not yet fully recovered, but it cannot be ruled out that this will be the next major project supported by Zhihu .

Finally, let me summarize with you:

1. You must persist . Although I don’t encourage you to post all kinds of content, as long as your content volume increases, it will eventually grow if you persist in stable updates for a year or two.

2. Try to avoid the micro-business field . Zhihu has strict control over some micro-business and gray area topics, and also keeps a close eye on accounts in this area.

3. Buy a membership and pay protection fee . Zhihu has a membership function. After activating it, you can read some books on Zhihu. In addition, if you want to be a traffic-generating account, it is recommended to buy a membership and pay a protection fee to the platform. Although it cannot completely protect you, it will relatively increase the weight of the account.

4. Be cautious when attracting traffic , and don’t post advertisements too directly and obviously on Zhihu. Once your account is blocked, its weight will plummet. In addition, it is also recommended that you create one or two more accounts to divert traffic, at least if your account is blocked, you will not be wiped out.

5. Avoid posting likes . At the end of July, Zhihu carried out a large-scale account blocking, specifically targeting some accounts suspected of posting likes. Many big accounts lost their accounts as a result. So, although the content needs a cold start, try to avoid posting likes as much as possible. Once the account is blocked, the gain will outweigh the loss.

Author:LZX

Source: LZX's study notes (LZX_PM)

Related reading:

Zhihu Monetization: Does the gene for selling goods equal the ability to sell goods?

How does Zhihu monetize? Zhihu monetization skills!

Zhihu traffic generation methods and techniques!

Zhihu traffic generation methods and techniques!