A piece of experience, copied to the talented and smart copywriter

A few years ago, I had the great fortune of meeting my first beauty director. After we separated, we still kept in touch. She's been feeling a little depressed lately.

She is struggling over whether or not to create a self-media account to write something, and asked me to give her some advice. Now it is 2017, and the new media environment has changed a lot. The awesome people can play like this.

1. Using words to please the world is so ugly

I told the director directly that if you are interesting and awesome, you should not open a public account if you are working in new media.

If you want to be liked on a public account, you must first learn to lock up your true self and then create an image that others like.

But the source of some people's awesomeness is that they stick to themselves. People with a strong personality are destined to be unsociable.

Every famous public account writer is a special actor. Papi Jiang has her fixed image, Mi Meng has her fixed image, and Sanbiao also has his image...

The remaining public account creators who have failed to solidify a specific image have all become information service personnel who are kidnapped by the number of readings. Some people provide readers with the latest cases, some provide readers with pan-entertainment information, and some provide hot news...

Although they maintain independent views, the copywriting circle is still swept up in the general environment and cannot escape being included in it, becoming a member of the information service community.
If a person becomes not excellent and does not live a beautiful life, it must start with being sociable. I don't want to see the director's sister being sociable, so the first point of writing this article is to advise her to try not to spend time on the official account.

I often receive some messages in the background, "I've been following you for so long", "I'm still a fan of the copywriting circle", "Is the editor here? Is there anyone? Can I consult you about copywriting?"... No one is a fan of anyone else. In the eyes of passers-by, we are all information service staff.

Gradually, I found that the way I used words to please the world was so ugly. Since then, I have updated once a week and once every ten days. This has been going on for more than a year.

2. Real and unsociable people on Zhihu

The public platform , which has been popular for three or four years, is now giving birth to an information dump of unprecedented scale.

Many people who are not yet adept at their jobs, do not have much talent, and do not have any profound views on the world are transforming from new media newcomers to industry veterans. What else can you write on a public account besides complaining?

Write about whatever is hot, as long as it can increase readership, even if it’s on the hot topics in the middle of the night. I will write about Wolf Warrior today, Twenty-Two tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow I will comment on Baidu’s poor PR…

Some new media people who are not dependent on the real economy have become online commentators who are talkative and eloquent. In order to gain traffic , they will not hesitate to control the direction of public opinion. The above is the irreversible new media environment of public accounts.

On the contrary, Zhihu, as a purer new media platform, its advantages are often overlooked.

Advantage 1: The life cycle of content is extended

How many days does a public account have in its life? 5 days? 3 days? 48 hours? Maybe even shorter; how long is the life of a piece of Zhihu content? One year? Two years? Three years? Maybe longer.

I tried to answer a question on Zhihu that was followed by more than 50,000 people. This answer has been receiving likes and comments since last year.

The article on the official account was forgotten three days after it was published. The content on Zhihu will still be read by people a year later. This is the difference in the life cycle.

Apart from Zhihu, few content platforms can extend the life cycle of a piece of content to more than one year. This is an extremely valuable life-saving elixir for high-quality content.

Advantage 2: A high-scoring answer is a long-term advertising space

My answer on the topic of "Public Account Editing Skills" received more than 600 likes and was also in a relatively high position. Someone working in a new media tool company actually contacted me and asked if I could pay to include their product in the article.

If you have more than 10 highly watched front-row answers, it is equivalent to having more than 10 high-quality advertising spots in your hands. You can soft-implant some of your own public accounts and e-commerce links in Zhihu answers, and you can also update them as needed. There are rewards, that's why some people use Zhihu.

None of this will cause much resentment. After all, awesome people on Zhihu don’t have to please anyone. There will always be people who appreciate your insights, and you are the master of your own Zhihu home.

Advantage 3: Creators are king, not subscribers

You don’t need to please anyone on Zhihu, content is king. The process of answering is equivalent to playing a cognitive competition PK with other answerers.

High-quality content can help others solve their doubts and achieve knowledge transformation . This is a tacit mutual achievement between the platform, users, and authors. It is determined by collective likes based on fair horizontal comparison of content.

Authors on Zhihu don’t need to play anyone’s role, don’t need to deliberately take other people’s preferences into consideration, and don’t need to waste time on typesetting. They just need to write down their true views on the issue.

People like Director Sister, who are beautiful, smart, experienced, and willing to organize themselves, but are often lazy and unable to update regularly, are born to be on Zhihu.

3. Experience sharing on Zhihu

People on Zhihu follow people, not content accounts. The most important content core of Zhihu is the following four big words.

Presenting cognitive gaps and experience depth is an important principle of Zhihu creation. Besides that, here are some tips.

1. Be true to yourself and be single-minded

Don't be pretentious or act pretentiously. Focus on the areas you like and answer questions that you are good at.

Zhihu will push you new questions based on the areas you have been interested in for a long time, or recommend you as an active answerer on a certain topic.

Giving 50 answers to the same topic is far more valuable than answering 50 questions randomly at random.

2. Invest in knowledge on Zhihu

The so-called investment is to maximize the "possibility of getting a return".

There is no need to waste time answering a question that has not received more than 100 attentions in the past six months; on the contrary, if a question is one you are good at but there are already 4,900 answers, you should try to write an answer that you are satisfied with.

Professional copywriters always have the confidence and ability to put their high-quality answers at the front.

3. A good answer requires continuous operation

Even if a question has 4,900 answers, the remaining 4,800 are almost negligible. All you have to catch up with are the first 100 answers.

If you have a high-quality answer, try to ask your colleagues and friends to help you like it on Zhihu. With these twenty or thirty likes, your ranking may rise by several hundred places, and the chance of being seen by others will be much greater.

A good answer, like a good bonsai, requires continuous management and care. As long as someone likes it, you can continue to update and supplement it, so that it can maintain its vitality for a longer time.

4. Focus on the number of likes in the short term and the number of followers in the long term

In the early stage, focus on selecting a few questions that you like and are highly concerned about. If your answers can be ranked in the top ten among all answers, you have completed the entry ceremony of Zhihu.

Once you join Zhihu, you must consciously increase your followers. For example, in the example above, more than 100,000 people may have viewed the answer of the answerer and left more than 10,000 likes, but only four or five people follow him. It makes no sense to do Zhihu in this way.

5. Don’t give orders, but share your expertise

Whether you are seeking to monetize content or to build capabilities in new media, you need to focus on one area.

After looking through the answer list mentioned above, I realized the reason for the low conversion rate. It mixes in various popular fields, and most of the topics are general entertainment, which does not reflect the professionalism in a certain field.

Even if such an answerer receives a lot of likes, his Zhihu account itself will not bring him much commercial value.

Only when you become a celebrity, a small-time figure, or a dedicated person in a certain field, will the voice you make in this field be influential. Someone has tried to do statistics and found that if the traffic is directed properly, a high-quality Zhihu post can bring hundreds of accurate subscribers to the public account.

The above is my experience, which I would like to give to my beautiful Director Qi Yu, and I would also like to copy it to my talented and intelligent copywriting partners. Zhihu has an advertising copy that tells the truth: "Be serious and you will win." It’s great to use it in this ending scene.