Zhihu monetization guide, look here!

I have been working on a Zhihu project recently, and last month I happened to participate in one of Zhihu’s official content monetization sections. Including the event bonus, I made more than 10,000 yuan in a single month.

After operating this project, because I also shared some related content and skills in the circle of friends, many friends came to consult and ask how to operate. I also made a summary based on this set of gameplay and shared some of my own experience and gameplay. Today, I will share with you some of Zhihu’s operational gameplay and monetization sections:

I won’t go into details about account maintenance here, after all, these are all very basic things, and there are many of them on Baidu. Here I will only talk in detail about Zhihu’s content operation and Zhihu’s recruitment task monetization:

1. Search for related 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.

When we write content, we can also embed keywords in multiple places in the article according to their popularity to increase the chances of being displayed on search engines.

2. 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.

You can also use tools to check the popularity of topics, and at the same time check the ranking of your own content under the current topic. It is very clear. Friends in need can directly chat with me privately. It is free.

3. High-quality content + pictures

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.

I personally suggest that a normal article should be under 1,000 words, as there will be more recommendations online. Then there is the issue of pictures to match the content, because you can also add "alt" in the picture attributes, and you can write two keywords in this place. If Baidu includes the picture, then others can also click on the picture on the Baidu picture website to enter the article.

4. Cold start

I won’t go into details about this here, because some of the content involved is rather obscure. After all, these are methods that are not officially accepted. If you are interested, you can discuss this on WeChat. In addition, this section also has detailed instructions in our Zhihu project.

Zhihu's recruitment task can also be simply understood as a product content order. The official will invite some brands to deliver content on Zhihu, and creators can also write relevant content based on the brand's products and the attributes of their own accounts.

The monetization model is very simple. Money is calculated based on the number of content readers. The unit price of each product is different, ranging from 0.45 per reading to more than 2 yuan. It depends on what kind of content you are suitable for writing.

Some friends may say that if some accounts do not have many fans, then there will definitely be few readers. Actually, it is not. Zhihu is a public domain platform. The difference between it and the official account is that the number of content readings of the official account will be related to the fans of the account platform. After all, it is a relatively closed content carrier.

Zhihu is different. Even if an account has only a few dozen fans, it can create content that is read by hundreds of thousands of people because of its platform mechanism. If your content is of high quality and recommended by the platform, it will be displayed on the homepage or other places, thus bringing very high exposure. This is also one of the reasons why many self-media people direct traffic from Zhihu to WeChat or public accounts.

So how can you carry out the recruitment task? There is a hard condition here, that is, the Zhihu creator level must reach 4 to apply for the task interface. However, from level 1 to 4, it is not very difficult. If you concentrate on doing it normally, you can basically reach level 4 in half a month to a month.

After reaching the threshold, let's talk about several content and skills of the recruitment task:

1. Content Rules

Although many tasks only require more than 500 words, if the content is very short, the introduction will not be very detailed, and the content will not be of high quality, which will affect the overall ranking of the content under the topic.

But it should be noted here that the number of words in the content cannot be too long, because it is charged based on effective reading, and this effective reading is generally considered effective reading when the user browses more than 80% of the content.

Therefore, it cannot be too long or too many, and users will not spend too much time on your content.

2. Content Writing

If you have good writing skills, then this is the best, because the official support for originality is still very good, especially for platforms that do not have such content, then there is a very good chance of being recommended. Once recommended and ranked among the top topics, then it is basically secure, and it is no problem to earn a few thousand from this task.

If you are not very good at copywriting, you can try to use your imagination or make a pseudo-original work, because the recruitment task is to promote a product.

There are many categories of products above, and it is impossible for you to have used all of them. When writing content for this type of task, product reviews are generally more attractive.

So for some tasks that you haven't used personally but want to write about, you can extract some content about the product from the official website of the product, and then combine it with your own thoughts on the product to make a semi-review article. It's okay to only answer some questions users have about the product.

3. How to select products

One thing that needs to be noted is that because there are many types of product tasks on the platform, and the unit price of each product is different, many people will choose to write those with high unit prices first.

But in fact, there will be a lot of competition for tasks with high unit prices. Many people will write them, and generally, the budget for such tasks will be spent within two days after they are published, causing the task to be completed early.

The content on Zhihu is long-tail content. For example, the content you post today will still have a certain number of readers next month. Therefore, there will be many large vertical players entering the market with high unit prices. For an ordinary player like you, you will definitely not be able to grab them. It is better for you to choose some tasks with less competition that can continuously bring in reading income.

Of course, this does not mean that it is not suitable to write for a high unit price. If the task product is more in line with the attributes of your account, then it is definitely recommended to write for a high unit price. After all, a single reading calculation is high and it is still very comfortable.

In fact, there are many related skills, such as submission time, how to choose topics, content cold start, etc. Because many of them are relatively confidential, I will not go into details here.

In essence, Zhihu's general operational direction is still on content writing. Based on the techniques we just mentioned in the content operation section and combined with the requirements of the monetization projects, there will not be any big problems.

I currently spend about an hour on Zhihu every day, posting 1-2 articles, and then I basically don’t do much management.

Of course, for some friends who are new to this section, it may take relatively longer time, but practice makes perfect. Once you get started and understand the rules and gameplay, you won’t find it difficult.

In fact, Zhihu has many other monetization sections besides the one we mentioned here, such as the well-known Zhihu Good Things, and Zhi+ Self-selection. If you have your own products to monetize, you can also monetize other products directly by directing traffic to WeChat, such as training, courses, etc.

Author:LZX

Source: LZX's study notes (LZX_PM)