How to quickly gain 100,000 followers on Zhihu with these 5 points!

To be honest, the president was quite reluctant to share this skill.

The president has worked on a batch of accounts, most of which completed the cold start in less than a month, with the number of fans quickly increasing to over 10,000, and some outstanding ones even exceeding 100,000.

Even though he is extremely lazy and has almost never produced any content on Zhihu and only posted articles from public accounts, the account "Xu Ge" has nearly 35,000 fans.

If you also want to build a personal brand and become a V on Zhihu, I believe this article will give you a lot of surprises.

Before we talk about the specific operations, let’s first sort out the ideas of creating a Zhihu celebrity.

Become a big V - get as many followers (fans) as possible - get as many likes, collections, and thanks (especially likes) as possible - create content that captures the user's psychology, get as much exposure as possible, and guide user behavior.

Once you have sorted out your ideas, I believe you can see which specific areas to start working on.

Let me lay the groundwork and sort out the traffic distribution logic of Zhihu for everyone.

That is, on-site and off-site search + topic tree + social and algorithm recommendation.

Zhihu site search display section

On-site and off-site searches refer to off-site traffic provided mainly by search engines such as Baidu. On-site searches refer to the display traffic brought by the Zhihu site search result page. On Zhihu, an appropriate content can often obtain good traffic both on-site and off-site.

Secondly, all questions on Zhihu are connected through a topic tree, with big topics containing small topics, which is well organized and makes the massive content structured.

Topic Tree

Even if you start from a very small field, you can dig up and down through the topic tree (view the entire topic structure), and finally the outline of the entire discipline (or industry) will emerge.

Zhihu Topics

This invisibly provides multiple openings for content exposure. For example, "Essence" will display a series of answers under the topic ranked according to the number of likes received. Occupying a position in the rankings under hot topics is of great significance. Many users have the habit of looking for the highest-rated answers, which generates a steady stream of traffic.

The key point to mention is Zhihu’s content distribution method. Unlike WeChat which focuses on social distribution and Toutiao which focuses on machine intelligence algorithms, Zhihu attaches equal importance to social distribution and algorithm recommendation in terms of content.

Social distribution is mainly reflected in the fact that the updates (answers, likes, questions, etc.) of subscribed bloggers will appear in the subscribers' information flow. At the same time, users will also receive partial notifications when there are new answers to the questions they follow. The reason why it is partly because there is an anti-harassment strategy intervention here. After all, if there are 1,000 answers to a question and each one is pushed to the subscriber, the notification bar will explode.

The above mechanism means that the more subscribers you have, the more people’s homepage information streams your content will be displayed in, giving you more exposure opportunities. At the same time, answering popular questions will also help you get more exposure.

Social distribution can also produce a social fission effect, because the relationship between subscribers and those who are subscribed is a nested network. When fans like your post, this dynamic will appear in the fan's fan information flow.

Algorithm recommendation is a section that Zhihu has intentionally strengthened in recent years (on the other hand, it means the weakening of the influence of big Vs on users). Whether it is the app or the PC, algorithm recommendation content occupies a separate column, almost on par with social distribution. It is even more favored on the PC, ranking before the "Follow" column.

The platform’s increased intervention in content distribution is mainly to enhance advertising monetization capabilities. The more intervention, the more advertising space there is.

Recommended interface

The content recommended by the algorithm mainly comes from the popular topics (or columns) subscribed by users. The old version had a high threshold and basically had answers with thousands of likes. Now, content with hundreds or even dozens of likes has the opportunity to enter the user's homepage recommended information flow.

There is no need to think twice about grabbing traffic from algorithm recommendations. Generally speaking, once you grab the traffic from social distribution, recommendations will come naturally.

After finishing the above preparation, you can directly point out the skills of creating hot answers——

Popular Question Examples

1. Try to answer popular questions under hot topics. The reason is simple. Each topic corresponds to a corresponding group of people. The popular questions under hot topics not only have a large instant traffic, but the traffic brought by "digging up the past" in the future will also be considerable.

Of course, if you think you are strong enough and your content is powerful enough, you can just go straight to the most popular questions and address them head on.

2. If your industry does not have much content on Zhihu, but industry-related keywords have a good index on the search engine, you can use another account (or even no other account), create questions based on existing popular questions, and ask and answer them yourself.

For example, "How to write a hot article on WeChat official account?" has become a popular question. If you are working on headlines, you can ask a question called "How to create a hot article on headlines?"

When asking questions, remember to grasp the key words and avoid being vague.

You can ask the question first and wait for a while, then other people will come and answer it to serve as supporting roles for you. Generally speaking, a third party's casual answer cannot outperform your long-planned answer.

3. There are too many things to consider when writing content, so here we only emphasize these points: make it as long as possible, include both text and pictures, be beautifully organized, and be well-organized.

Zhihu has long passed the era where you could gain followers by making a witty remark in just a sentence of a dozen words (fewer words would be folded). The more words you code, the more impressive it looks and the more advantages you have.

Being longer is not necessarily better, but it reflects an attitude, and the "friends" who are searching hard for the truth on the question-and-answer platform really like it.

4. Guide people to like

Example of guiding likes

Isn’t the purpose of writing so much to entice readers to give you a like? Just say it directly.

At key points, you can be clever and make some witty remarks to ask for rewards, and you will get twice the result with half the effort.

"Everyone who liked this comment, if a man's penis grows an inch, a woman's breasts will grow by one cup size~"

"The information is so shocking, please give a thumbs up before watching to prevent loss"

…

As for attracting likes, as long as your content is acceptable and your wording is appropriate, Zhihu will not delete your posts at the moment. If you don’t believe it, you can try reporting a few.

As for increasing likes and followers, manual increase is too expensive, and machine increase is easy to be blocked, but mutual aid groups are feasible...

5. Hot sale diversion

No matter how unlucky a person is, as long as he perseveres, he will be able to produce some hit products. At this time, he must not miss the well he has already dug. You can attach relevant (or even irrelevant) previous answers or columns at the end of the article, using a similar approach to the related readings at the end of WeChat public accounts.

Another area where you can do something is with the questions themselves. If you answer a few more questions, your account will have editing permissions. At this time, you can link unpopular questions with popular questions. For example, many mirror questions are related to each other.

High salt levels can really do whatever you want

It can be said that through editing permissions (you can play with it carefully yourself, there are many ways to play), you can even define an industry, not to mention making a niche topic become a hot topic.

Here I would like to share with you some tips on using Zhihu. These are what I have accumulated during my daily practice. They are very practical and anyone who uses them will know them.

1. Use beautiful girl avatars to increase followers

What kind of topics are the most popular on Zhihu? I think there are two types: one is the type of beautiful women posting photos, and the other is the type of sharing photos to make money. Beauty and making money are timeless and eternal topics.

I know a newcomer on Zhihu, a beautiful girl who gained followers by sharing photos of her body and quickly accumulated several thousand fans. Later, when she answered questions about skin care, businesses approached her to place advertisements.

Seeing this, you may think that other people are beauties and they are blessed by God, but I don’t have that ability.

Yes, we do not have this ability, but we can still use the factor of "beauty" to achieve our goals.

For example, when we are an unknown person on Zhihu, we can find a photo of a beautiful woman as our avatar.

Think about it, when we are chatting in a WeChat group or browsing our Moments, and we see a beautiful girl’s profile picture, do we have an urge to chat with her?

Even though we know that this beautiful woman’s profile picture is probably a picture from the Internet and not her real self.

Think about it carefully, don’t those scammers who sell tea always use a beautiful woman as their profile picture?

Facts have proven that using beautiful female profile pictures is indeed effective. Beautiful women are not only pleasing to the eyes, but also make people let down their guard.

When others see your answer and think it’s well-written, and then they see that your avatar is a beautiful woman, what are you waiting for?

If you are interested, you can take a look at the questions where beautiful girls post photos. Many of the girls who answer the questions are unknown on Zhihu like everyone else, but they just shared their photos and their number of fans increased rapidly.

After seeing this, have you, who are still working hard to answer questions and gain followers, shed tears of envy?

After sharing the technique of making money, friends in the circle quickly took action and the results were immediate!

This trick was not something the president imagined. When the president first started using Zhihu, he met a Zhihu big V from Tsinghua University. After they got to know each other, the big V told the president that his first 20,000 followers were due to him using his girlfriend's avatar, and he later switched back to his own when he had more fans.

As expected of Tsinghua University, the operation is so cool and practical!

I still remember how confused I was when I first heard about this trick: If I had known this trick earlier, my number of users might have doubled…

2. Look for keywords outside of the product

I found that many people directly look for keywords based on the attributes of the product itself, such as directly searching for "mobile phone", "snacks", etc. This is of course very practical, and if done well, it can also dominate the traffic of Baidu Vision.

In fact, we can also go beyond the product itself and look for keywords based on our familiarity with the product industry.

When I was selling crabs, I found that some customers had a wrong understanding of crabs. For example, some people thought that crabs during the Mid-Autumn Festival were the most delicious, and some people only ate female crabs and didn’t know that male crabs were also delicious...

I thought this was a good entry point, so I searched the keyword "secret" on Zhihu and found the question "What are the little secrets that only people in that circle know?"

It turned out that this was a very high-quality question. My answer to this question once received 20k likes, but was accidentally deleted for violating the rules. I reorganized it and posted it, and now it has 3k likes again.

For example, one of the answers to the question "What are some little secrets that only people in that circle know about?" is about a little secret in the snack industry.

After the answerer simply shared this little secret that some popular snack brands are actually processed by OEM factories, he directly connected to Zhihu's good product recommendations and inserted dozens of product links of the same snacks produced by the OEM factories, and it became popular all of a sudden.

With 120,000 likes, you can imagine how much exposure it gets and how much commission you can get from it. If the author also searches for keywords like "snacks" to answer questions, will the same effect be achieved?

Let me give you another example. I sell hairy crabs, and I also have crab cards, which are suitable for gift giving. Wang Zulan was doing a Taobao live broadcast to sell crab cards for Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs, but it failed. The merchant ran away and consumers were unable to redeem them. Many people went to Wang Zulan’s Weibo to scold him.

So what opportunities do I smell? I went to Zhihu and searched for keywords like "Taobao" and "scam", and found the question "Do you know what disgusting scams there are on Taobao?" Then I can answer this question and then embed my own hook to achieve my goal of attracting traffic.

If you search for "hairy crab" directly, can you find this problem? You should know that this question has been on the hot list many times and the traffic is very considerable.

3. Rapid increase in salt value

You can understand Zhihu's salt value as Alipay's Sesame Credit score. The higher the salt value, the higher your account weight.

Looking at Zhihu's interpretation of salt value, we know that we can increase the salt value by reporting. Zhihu encourages everyone to report illegal content to purify the community.

Here are some of my practical experiences to avoid pitfalls:

1. Remember to check the acceptance record after reporting. Why check it out? This way you can find out whether some comments you are unsure about violate the rules. If the report is successful, you won’t have to hesitate next time you encounter such comments.

2. After a while, check the comment section again for any issues you have reported. Just like there are endless leeks to harvest, one crop after another. After a while, when you check the comment section of the issue you reported, you will find new unfriendly comments waiting for you to harvest. Doesn’t that feel good?

3. Increasing the salt value by reporting is very practical for accounts with low salt value, but it is not so obvious when it exceeds 700. After the first successful report, my salt value increased from 779 to 812. Then I reported it again and found that it had no effect. It seems that after the salt value exceeds 700, it still needs to be improved by producing high-quality content. After all, Zhihu is a content community.

4. Tips for answering questions on Zhihu

The star master @亦仁老师 who is good at making money raised a very interesting question on the community’s 518 membership day. It became popular on Zhihu. After seeing it, I wrote this answer on a whim.

Because I was on Zhihu, I combined the Snail Hunting incident that was very popular on Zhihu before to develop my answer. I took advantage of the popularity of Snail Hunting and transferred the traffic of Snail Hunting among Zhihu users to my answer.

The question of chasing snails is very popular on Zhihu.

I suggest that you click on the “Read original text” at the end of the article to read my article, which will help you understand it better.

If you search for "snail chasing" on Zhihu, you will see that some answerers embedded the "snail chasing" meme when answering questions of similar nature, and as a result, they received tens of thousands of likes, proving that this method can be replicated.

When you answer questions on Zhihu in the future, you can also use this technique to achieve twice the result with half the effort. This requires you to hang out on Zhihu more often and read more, so that you can develop your sensitivity.

In this way, when you see a related topic, you can immediately think of some of the hot memes on Zhihu, and then cleverly connect the two together, thereby transferring the traffic of the hot memes to your answer.

In addition, you can take a look at how the highly-rated answers are answered.

When I was observing other highly-rated answers, I found that several articles used an inventory structure, which is to list 1, 2, 3, etc., one by one. I think this template looks clear and concise, and is especially suitable for outputting practical articles, so I used it directly.

Later I thought that the reason why my answer about popular science about crabs received 20k likes was largely due to this inventory-based structure.

By studying the highly-rated answers, we can also know how to format the text to improve the reading experience, such as extracting the key quotes and putting them in bold, using a text structure of long and short sentences, and not allowing a paragraph to exceed five lines, etc.

In this way, we can also quickly write an article with smooth and concise layout. After all, if we have useful information, the layout must be beautiful to make people want to read on.

When you don’t know how to answer a question, imitating others is always the best shortcut.

There is a saying that goes, the devil is in the details, and there is a lot of money in the details. If you take care of the details I mentioned, making money will be a natural process.

Thinking divergently, Zhihu accounts can directly lead small accounts, and can also form groups and alliances, especially high-authority accounts, which are more powerful.

Author: President Banxia

Source: Arbor Operations

Related reading:

Creative analysis of advertising on Zhihu platform!

Practical operation! 4 tips for attracting traffic from Zhihu!

Zhihu account anti-ban rules and product promotion guidelines!

Zhihu’s traffic pool!