A summary of my 9-year career experience: Even after being laid off, I still helped start my own business

The author summarizes his personal career experience and gives some insights and suggestions on the workplace, hoping to be helpful to Internet people, people in the workplace, self-media people, individual IPs, entrepreneurs, etc.

33 years old, with 9 years of experience in the workplace, he has handled many classic cases in the tool circle. The past is just a prologue. What is it like to start from scratch and start an IP content business?

It took me more than 10 days to finish the 15,000 words of sincere work, reviewing my growth history over the past 9 years. It is just an ordinary person's tortuous growth path of upgrading and fighting monsters. After reading it, it may really help you avoid 5 years of detours.

About my journey from being a veteran in the workplace after being laid off to starting a self-media IP business that made over 5 figures in cash in just over 2 months.

If you are an Internet person, a working person, a self-media person, an individual IP, an entrepreneur, etc., I hope that my shallow personal experience in my 9-year career can be helpful and inspiring to you.

I have always firmly believed that there is no such thing as something that comes out of nowhere in this world, only ordinary people walking on thin ice.

1. Continue to deepen your efforts and learn from outstanding companies in the industry

After graduation, I started from scratch in an Internet company in Hangzhou. Under the guidance of my master, I learned some skills in Internet operation and promotion by buying books and visiting industry forums. However, I did not have any system framework in my mind. It was all scattered knowledge, because I did not have enough understanding of the Internet ecosystem at that time.

Later, I switched to a well-known Internet listed company in Hangzhou, and my salary increased with this jump.

I worked in this company for several years in the channel promotion business. At that time, it was the hot money period of mobile Internet. The advertising department where I worked had an agency budget of tens of millions every year to do paid advertising and help B-side customers complete traffic purchase work.

During my work, I came into contact with many Internet brand circles and learned a lot of knowledge about traffic promotion, especially paid traffic. At the same time, I also came into contact with the 0-1 and 1-10 stages of many Internet projects. I also accumulated some underlying traffic methodologies, which gave me a preliminary system concept of the Internet ecosystem.

In addition, it also allowed me to come into contact with many Internet business people, which completely opened up my understanding of business cooperation and greatly improved my face-to-face expression skills; after all, to do traffic channel business, you have to go out from time to time.

Later, due to the disappearance of the demographic dividend, the craze for mobile Internet gradually faded. I remember that in 2019, the company transformed and entered the field of short videos/live broadcasts, and now it is doing very well. At that time, in order to reduce labor costs, the company began to lay off employees, and I was one of them.

Actually, regarding layoffs, each department in the company has quotas, and department leaders have no choice. In addition, the business I was in charge of at the time was shrinking due to market conditions, so the department's layoff quota undoubtedly fell on me...

Later, I resigned and took a break for a while. At the same time, I also bought some books on marketing and traffic growth to learn. It was also during this period that I read two books on marketing and growth, which enlightened me on the future business level.

During the years I worked at the company, I learned some things about the Internet and the workplace:

• In the workplace, you must be an employee who creates actual value and benefits, and be irreplaceable in your position.
• All crows are black. Every company has its bad aspects. It just depends on whether you can accept it.
• Sometimes resources are more important than your abilities. Before you can link up, you must first clarify the value you can exchange.
• There is no company you can stay in for your whole life, but what you learn and internalize can stay with you for a lifetime.
• Internet business has its bonus windows and industry cycles, and no business model can last forever.
• For those who know how to do business on the Internet, there is no ceiling in the workplace; those who don’t understand the business can only be cogs in the wheel.
• The essence of the Internet is the traffic business. To obtain traffic efficiently and continuously, you have to spend money and have a high input-output ratio.
• To do paid traffic well, first find a promotion position in a wealthy company and use other people's money to practice your skills and summarize methodology.
• We should follow the Internet traffic wherever it goes, and the platform's traffic costs are increasing every day, so we should get the most traffic as soon as possible.

···

The work experience in this company is precious. It has completely opened my eyes to the Internet traffic business. It has also made me more deeply aware that the essence of the Internet is traffic, and it has made me more obsessed with learning the ability to generate traffic.

2. Dive into the short video field, and manage the QD APP from 0 to 1 to have over 10 million users per year

What is the secret of traffic management for the Qingdou APP to increase the number of users by tens of millions in one year? I will talk about this valuable experience in more detail, after all, the non-compete clause period has also expired.

It is not easy to start a business with 0-1 growth management. The right time, right place and right people are even more indispensable. We can see that the success of all things out there is the result of countless hard work.

In 2020, the short video wave completely opened a new chapter. Short video platforms represented by Douyin and Kuaishou swept the Internet and even the whole country. At that time, Douyin had 400 million daily active users, and it had not yet been fully commercialized.

At this time, I had already realized that the changes in users’ content consumption habits brought about by short videos meant that future business was destined to be inseparable from short videos, and that we must keep up with this wave of traffic trends.

So in 2020, I was ready to find a company in Hangzhou that does short video-related business, and to enter this field to study in depth and practice short video content traffic gameplay; after interviewing several companies, I chose Hangzhou Qingdou Network Technology Network Co., Ltd. without hesitation, which was still in the 0 stage at the time and had less than 5 people.

This choice is a challenge as well as an opportunity for me.

In addition to the fact that small startups can particularly help hone one's all-round abilities, I also want to know what my ability is in growing a new product if I have no resources.

In this way, I should have become the fifth employee of Qingdou Company and the only traffic growth operator. In addition, there are CEOs, product managers, crawler technology, front-end technology, operations... Startups are so small and beautiful, and I really enjoyed the atmosphere of starting a business in a small team at that time.

At the beginning, the product positioning of Qingdou APP was to benchmark professional data platforms such as Feigua Data and Chanmama, and to be a free Douyin short video data tool. The core user positioning is KOC short video content creators. The value provided by the product is to provide content data support for users and solve the problem of amateur KOC monetization.

Unfortunately, this product positioning did not work, but by chance, other directions worked, which will be discussed below...

This may be the charm of entrepreneurship. You never know what is next. Only by adapting to the market can you taste the fruits of victory.

In order to run the app and investigate user needs at the beginning, Qingdou was developed as an MVP product in the form of a WeChat applet. I still remember that the first wave of test traffic was obtained from "Juyi.com", which was the very popular banned word detection tool.

This tweet was posted on November 11, 2020 by the CEO of Qingdou

This tweet brought the first batch of seed users to the Qingdou WeChat applet, but unfortunately, the retention rate of these users was very poor, and they basically left after half a month. At that time, in my opinion, in addition to the traffic problem, the rest was the problem of the product itself (either the product function experience was poor, or the core function was useless to the target users).

After joining Qingdou, I took over the traffic growth of the product, while other colleagues were optimizing and iterating bugs on the product. My core goal was to continue to get the target user traffic to help the product manager get user product experience feedback and conduct user demand research.

In the early days, Qingdou’s promotion budget was tight, and we didn’t cooperate with many good promotion channels due to their high quotes; as a result, I asked Qingdou’s CEO for resignation at that time... But with his persuasion and support, I continued to persevere.

Although there is capital behind Qingdou, it will not easily invest money unless the capital sees hope in the product data.

The turning point of traffic growth began when I started looking for bloggers to promote my products on Douyin. I still remember that the first blogger I promoted on Douyin was "Wang Xiaoyan is an operator".

The video went viral soon after it was posted. I spent more than 1,000 yuan on Doujia for this video, and it reached 60,000 likes (speaking of Doujia, I have invested hundreds of thousands of yuan in Qingdou in total). At that time, this video attracted tens of thousands of users to the Qingdou WeChat applet.

This month, Qingdou launched two new features, namely "watermark removal" and "text extraction". This difficult problem fell on me. These two features already exist on the market. How can I make them popular?

Later, I already had the answer in my mind: I could only rely on Douyin to do explosive content marketing, leverage more content recommendation traffic, and make it popular within the circle and then go beyond it; then use Uncle Golden Gun’s classic marketing line "I have what others don’t, I have it before others, I make a loud noise when others are ahead, and I counter when others make a loud noise."

In addition, the time window was very good at that time. Because of the masks, people all over the country stayed at home and watched Douyin on their phones. It was also during this period that Douyin's oral knowledge payment field emerged and grew rapidly. My perception of traffic at the front end told me that this must be the trend, coupled with the data feedback from the back end of the product.

I also told the CEO that we should gain scale as soon as possible to seize the market. After all, Qingdou didn’t have any core competitiveness at that time. To put it bluntly, it was just a small tool collection software... Later, the CEO also agreed to seize the opportunity and quickly occupy the market share of Douyin in the knowledge payment field, and then expanded the team again.

However, I had a very troublesome promotion problem at that time. Douyin had a serious impact on works that attracted traffic from outside the site, and at that time, Douyin's traffic was all done through WeChat mini-programs. In order to break through this level and reduce the probability of traffic limit for popular works, I also put a lot of thought and tested for a long time before I found a proper solution.

Before the Spring Festival at the end of January 2021, the number of users of the Qingdou Mini Program was nearly 100,000; this was the team’s year-end celebration banquet at the time. After all, 100,000 was the original annual target number of users, and I achieved the annual target in just one month by relying on Douyin’s popular content marketing...

The entrepreneurial team atmosphere during this period was really great. Although I usually worked overtime until midnight most of the time... I enjoyed it because I could clearly feel that I was growing rapidly and could continue to see the positive feedback of Qingdou's overall growth.

During the 2021 Spring Festival holiday, a viral video completely made the "text extraction" function of Qingdou explode in the Douyin voice-over expert circle! It is the following "Little Dongzi Brother" video with 37,000 likes.

The first natural flow explosion must be saved

After returning to the company after the New Year, the investors behind it saw the stable user data of the Qingdou mini program and began to provide strong financial support. Then I took advantage of the opportunity to follow this wave of popularity and found a dozen oral knowledge bloggers to copy this popular video. In this way, Qingdou's copywriting extraction function became completely famous in the Douyin oral expert circle.

This popularity also brought a lot of tap traffic to Qingdou. After all, as long as the blogger talks about this content, there will be a lot of traffic at that time!

Later, with the promotion budget in hand, I cooperated with more and more big names in the knowledge payment field of Douyin and Xiaohongshu. During this period, I also learned from many big V bloggers and understood how to better build personal IP and how to create popular content in self-media.

Then, combined with my own experience in content marketing and online sense, the number of popular videos created by the experts I selected at that time was countless…

In just three months, I relied on explosive content marketing to bring the number of users of the Qingdou WeChat applet to over 300,000. At the same time, the company was developing the Qingdou product in the form of an APP.

Later, I collaborated with blogger A Yu and created a video with 580,000 likes, the highest in my career of hot content marketing. Of course, there are too many hot videos that I collaborated with other Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou bloggers with hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of likes...

That is to say, in the first few months of 2021, it is difficult for you to avoid seeing the popular short videos on Douyin and Xiaohongshu in the knowledge payment field...

This operation experience also made me truly feel the explosive leverage of explosive content marketing and platform content recommendation traffic. My colleagues in the company said that I can be as powerful as a traffic team... Of course, I also know that this is the result of the right time, right place, and right people.

Later, I promoted the watermark removal function, teleprompter, banned words, and mutual follower car. Because of the high popularity, it also spread to the Xiaohongshu platform, causing the light shaking function to become popular on the platform as well. (Although I promoted the light shaking mutual follower car function, I always thought it was a very bad gray function).

Later on, Qingdou had already become very popular in the core circles, so the probability of producing a hit product increased.

After encountering the bottleneck of traffic growth, I came up with a trick to use content quantity to counter content quality: the explosive matrix gameplay of Star Map expert submissions + Qingdou partners recruiting experts (the company is still using my gameplay until now).

Once I create a hit video, I use these two sets of traffic strategies to have influencers copy this hit video. Instantly, 400-500 similar hit videos can appear on Tik Tok and Xiaohongshu within 2 days, using quantity to fight against the probability of a hit video.

In order to implement this gameplay, the company started recruiting people for me to manage the creation and distribution of popular content by nearly a thousand influencers on the WeChat account of Qingdou Enterprise. Later, after I refined the SOP, I gave it to the new people to manage.

This strategy of using quantity to fight against the probability of a hit product worked very well at the time. Within a year, the number of Qingdou users exceeded nearly 10 million, far exceeding the 100,000 user target set by the CEO for 2021.

Of course, to achieve this result, in addition to having good products that meet the needs of market users, traffic and marketing are also indispensable. This is also the core reason why many short video gadget products did not go viral at the time, but Qingdou did.

Later, because of differences between me and the senior executives recruited from outside the company on some issues, the continued high-intensity pressure from the business, and the many negative changes in the atmosphere after the team had more people, I submitted my resignation at the end of 2021 and left Qingdou, which I had single-handedly managed and regarded as my child, because this product was polished and pieced together by the initial members together, and it was not the credit of just one person. In the end, I saw that it had been changed beyond recognition, which was really uncomfortable.

Some time after I left my job, my former colleagues told me that many startup employees had also left. Then I thought it was a matter of time. People whose values ​​and ideals are not in the same dimension are destined to be just passers-by on the journey.

During the period of operating Qingdou, there are many stories about my communication and cooperation with big bloggers and learning from seniors in the online earning circle. I won’t go into details... But from my experience, you can tell you that to learn the money-making mindset, just watch those people make money. To learn real skills, you need to enter the circle of Internet growth operations.

To be honest, people need to break out of their circles and explore in order to see a bigger world. Constantly colliding with your current cognition and then turning cognition into practice can help you internalize and grow faster and better. However, you also need to know how to grasp the degree of mixing in circles, and never get lost in the trap of going back and forth in circles.

This work experience is also the most precious wealth in my life so far. It allowed me to truly experience the anticipation - hardship - struggle - joy - tears - reflection - pain - and continuing to move forward from 0 to 1 of starting a business.

It was also during my time at Qingdou that I thoroughly improved my all-round understanding of the workplace, products, content, marketing, traffic, and business:

• Learn from others and leverage their power.
• People are tempered by things, and their minds are trained by things.
• When it comes to learning, who you keep your eyes on determines the limit of your growth.
• If you encounter a boss in the workplace who doesn’t understand strategy and business model, run away as soon as possible.
• If you encounter a boss in the workplace who makes big promises but doesn't take any real action, run away as soon as possible.
• If you encounter a boss who won’t share your salary, run away as soon as possible, especially if he is the boss of a startup you co-founded from the 0th stage.
• Many things in the workplace cannot stand the test. The only things that can stand the test are your ability and confidence.
• The only relationship between a company and an individual is one of interest. The company gives money and you provide results. You owe nothing to each other and you complement each other.
• As a department leader, you cannot just be strong alone, you must learn to lead others to help you share the business.
• When you go to a small company to do business and rush to do things when you see them, this is the closest time to starting your own business in the workplace.
• Anything that can achieve great success depends on the right time, place and people; none of them can be missing.
• Before you verify the market feedback of your product, make an MVP (minimum viable solution) first.
• When it comes to product research and development, satisfying demand and creating demand are two completely different concepts.
• A product that can meet the needs of most target users and make money is a truly good product, otherwise it is worthless.
• When making products, you must control the boundaries. If the market/platform does not allow you to do something, don’t cross the line.
• When making products, you should be closer to users, listen to their feedback, and work backwards from their needs to find the best product iterations. Don’t be too self-satisfied.
• Making products is about addressing users’ real pain points, providing solutions that exceed their expectations, and continuously optimizing the experience process.
• If you don’t make money when your product is at its peak of popularity and potential, then your chances of making big money in the future will be slim.
• When doing product marketing, don’t think about who are the target users. First find the core users and focus on one circle.
• For tool-type products, the growth engine still comes from the iteration of the product’s own functional points.
• Content is the carrier of traffic, traffic is the carrier of marketing, and traffic + data dually drive business growth.
• The essence of all traffic gameplay on the Internet is to create content; and content marketing is a long-term field worth deepening.
• Hot content marketing will be a must-have for every company in the future, especially for individual entrepreneurs.
• Paid placement is an efficient traffic lever. Continue to find companies that will allow you to spend money responsibly and establish the underlying methodology for paid traffic placement.
• The essence of acquiring platform traffic is algorithm + content, and the essence of content is understanding human nature; and content operation is not only about quantity, but also about quality, and it is best to take both into account.
• When starting a business and making products, you must plan your commercial monetization model in advance, otherwise no matter how much traffic you get, it will all be in vain.

3. Continuous practice and internalization of methodology, 1-10 operation of MeiCe APP revenue growth

Not long after I left my job, a friend of mine from the same industry invited me to take over a tool product called Meice. They offered me a high enough salary and project dividends. After a preliminary evaluation, I decided to work on the full growth of the product, from traffic to product to revenue.

MeiCe APP was also a popular vertical account editing APP in the short video broadcasting field at that time. Book list accounts, funny animation accounts, 3D music accounts, hand-painted accounts, etc. can all be done through MeiCe APP. (It was also during my tenure at this company that I improved my video editing skills).

At that time, the core problem when I took over this product was the lack of traffic and revenue. After joining the company, I worked backwards from the revenue results to identify the core problems in the business process, and discovered that there were problems with the precise delivery of front-end traffic, the delivery of the product's core functions, and the product's user experience path.

Next, I took three key actions:

1. In terms of front-end traffic delivery, I use the explosive content marketing methodology that I summarized in Qingdou + Star Map expert submissions + expert explosive matrix gameplay and input-output ratio thinking.
2. Direct users who have lost connection at key links in the product chain into the private domain and conduct community companionship conversion (in the form of experience coupons).
3. Private domain opinion leaders create distribution fission.

Tactically, this set of actions produced results after only one month of execution, and the business data results in the third month are as follows.

The ROI of this product on Douyin increased by nearly 4 times. The ROI of the previous person in charge was 1.6, and the highest it reached after I took over was 5.72.

After users who lost interest in key product links were directed to private community groups, the community’s paid conversion rate increased by nearly 15% in one week.

Exceeded product revenue targets in the first quarter of 2022.

Why do I remember it so clearly? Because the growth data of the business I took over will definitely be archived in my own computer.

Yes, I completely internalized and reused the methodology of hot-selling content marketing that I had accumulated when I was operating Qingdou + the methodology of Star Map expert submission + the expert hot-selling matrix gameplay. At that time, this combination of punches made it very easy for me to promote products on Douyin and get hot-selling traffic.

Therefore, the short videos I made after taking over the business have sold tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views... It feels so good to use a set of replicable successful methodology to do things. Of course, I still use this methodology now, and I keep iterating and optimizing it.

However, after doing it for nearly 8 months, I felt something was wrong. MeiCe was no longer popular on Douyin! Later, I analyzed the following reasons:

1. This product has been promoted for a long time in the target group, and users are visually fatigued;
2. The core functions of the product have been almost washed in the field. This type of vertical account creation is a short-term project in the online earning industry. The low threshold is bound to be fiercely competitive, and the popularity of the life cycle is only a few months away.
3. In the more than half a year since I joined the company, there have been no updates to product functionality; for tool products, functionality is the growth engine for traffic.

In the end, the core problem still lies in traffic, but the target audience of this product is a bit special, basically middle-aged and elderly people...

So from the perspective of traffic, Kuaishou and official accounts are more suitable, but it is not as convenient to cooperate with KOL/KOC on Kuaishou as on platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu. In addition, the cost of public account placement is high, and the content placed cannot gather momentum and form brand voice...

At that time, when I was operating Meice, I paused and kept thinking about what the final outcome would be for APP products that earn revenue through membership fees?

When I encounter a problem, I tend to look for answers from people.

During those years, I also kept learning from excellent people in the online earning circle and knowledge payment field. Later, I realized that the problem of MeiCe product lies in its business model.

If no adjustments are made, given the attributes of this product, it will always be on the road of input-output ratio and product function iteration, and it will not be able to form compound interest, nor will it be able to see the so-called growth flywheel. This will be very tiring for me as a growth operator.

I reported this to my boss but to no avail.

Adhering to my understanding during the period of operating Qingdou, "If you meet a boss who doesn't understand the business model in the workplace, run away as soon as possible", I also decisively proposed to resign. (Every time I can take the initiative to resign, it is probably because I have enough savings to give me the courage).

In my workplace concept, the company pays me to solve problems, so I have to produce results for the company; otherwise, I would feel guilty about taking a high salary... Secondly, if I continue to stay, I will only continue to waste energy with the company, and my personal development and growth space will be limited.

To be honest, every time I asked for resignation, I didn't owe the company anything, because I always got more than expected results. However, this kind of thinking made me suffer a lot in my career. I had to start from scratch when looking for a job later, and I didn't have much experience. But I am absolutely confident in my personal ability.

Because when you master the underlying laws of things and have your own knowledge system, you can find that they are transferable and interoperable when facing different things. People who have a consensus naturally understand this principle.

Moreover, consensus can be a luxury that belongs only to a few.

If I had achieved success in the company like most people, it would have been comfortable for me to just be a leader and go with the flow and do my job, but this is not what I want...

During my time working at MeiCe, I gained new insights and grew:

• If you meet a boss who supports your internal entrepreneurship, you should be grateful and cherish him.
• The atmosphere of the entrepreneurial team is crucial. A team without cohesion is a mess.
• As a department leader, you need to work harmoniously with the team and take decisive measures when you encounter members who spread negative energy.
• The paid content marketing model is crucial and determines the final ROI
• No matter what the product is like, as long as the marketing is good, there will always be a target group of people who will pay for the product.
• Paid content marketing is the best amplifier, leveraging momentum to expand brand voice
• The essence of doing business is to grow. Business decomposition is only one part of growth. Growth thinking runs through the entire business.
• The first choice to expand revenue during the bottleneck period is to upgrade the business model, followed by obtaining more traffic, and finally product iteration/matrix
• People who are too strong in personal business ability may not be suitable for the workplace, or they may lack a boss who is on the same wavelength as them (after all, many bosses who work on Internet products come from management, technology, or product backgrounds, and bosses with business thinking or traffic thinking are quite rare)

···

4. Focus on the core elements, 0-1 entrepreneurial difficulty rebirth and passion

After my career came to an end, I had to reset my mindset and face the IP content entrepreneurship from 0 to 1. There were indeed many difficulties to overcome in the early stages.

Especially since I didn’t have the ability to write articles before, I looked for information everywhere to refine the underlying logic of writing, and then continued to practice deliberately before I overcame this level.

After all, if you can’t present it in the form of text/video/audio, how can you start an IP content business? Of course, if you don’t have enough experience and professional knowledge in the field, it won’t work. It may be difficult to think of a few words...

I am not a very good writer now, I can just write a good article anytime I want; but as for writing, you will achieve qualitative changes only when you write more, especially your personal thinking expression and knowledge system will be improved.

In addition, whether in the workplace or in personal IP entrepreneurship:

• How should we deal with the fierce competition in the market?
• And how can you use your own experience outside of the workplace to explore side jobs to make money and achieve exponential growth?
• What core issues do 0-1 individuals need to pay attention to when starting a business?

Based on my current limited personal entrepreneurial experience, I would like to share with you some growth experiences I have summarized.

1. Core business competitiveness, recognize your own advantages

The essence of business is value exchange.

To me, entrepreneurship is a process of using your own strengths to provide solutions to other people's needs and gain mutual value exchange. In terms of competitiveness, you can either solve problems that your peers cannot solve and occupy an ecological niche, or you can solve user problems and deliver an experience that exceeds expectations.

As for me, I just know how to generate some traffic. I used to help others do it. After thinking carefully, why don’t I create IP myself to empower subsequent business? It’s not that I don’t have the conditions to create IP…

So I used the knowledge I had accumulated about IP+traffic system, chose the direction, and started to create the "Seventh Uncle Entrepreneurship Circle" IP public account. As a result, I was making money in just over a month.

Of course, when creating your own media IP, don’t be in a hurry to make money; if you do your job well, money will come naturally.

2. The correct direction and method are the prerequisites for full execution

Going in the wrong direction and using the wrong methods will only make you constantly doubt your life.

This is my first experience when I first tried to create a knowledge IP for Douyin. Later, I kept reflecting on it and even learned from excellent people. Only then did I come up with the sentence in my WeChat signature: "Analyze the essence, make progress day by day, and gain true knowledge through actual combat."

Background picture of Uncle Qi's circle of friends

So when I was working on the IP public account, I could easily get positive feedback results if I was fully executed in the right direction and method. This is effective execution. So far, I have published about 100 articles in the past six months, including the deleted articles, which is equivalent to updating 16 articles every month (last year when I was doing other work).

Of course, if you don’t have many years of experience, you may not know what the correct direction and method are; if you want to go fast, you will have to ask experienced seniors for advice.

Once you are over 30, you will realize how precious time is.

3. Focus on core competitiveness and do things with thresholds and barriers

There is nothing we can do about the entrepreneurial atmosphere in China... The entrepreneurial philosophy of most people is to follow imitation and then copying, which leads to many low-threshold projects. Once people find out that they are very profitable, people will flock in and divide up the market.

So when faced with this kind of market trend, I would choose to do the difficult but right thing.

Because I have not only achieved results in terms of traffic for previous companies, but now I have also achieved results for myself and many other people.

After all, the core of all Internet businesses is to first solve the problem of continuous acquisition of accurate traffic! Without traffic, there is no need to talk about product monetization.

4. Focus on a certain field and do things that are 1 meter wide and 100 meters deep

I have been dealing with traffic business throughout my career, so I was able to use my past experience to summarize in-depth personal opinion articles such as "Six Traffic-Gaining Systems" , which have been recognized and reprinted by millions of big accounts in multiple industries.

Then, based on my ability to generate traffic, it is also feasible for me to choose to enter the field of self-media IP to empower traffic for more entrepreneurial IPs. After all, I have enough knowledge about personal IP business, otherwise I would not have summarized such in-depth opinion articles as "Personal IP Six Force Model" , and I have also achieved certain results for my own IP.

Therefore, personal IP self-media entrepreneurship + IP traffic empowerment is what I will do next, which is 1 meter wide and 100 meters deep.

I also firmly believe that by focusing on and deeply cultivating a certain vertical field, as time goes by and industry experience accumulates, one will become valuable enough, especially after producing enough results, the qualitative change it triggers will be extremely explosive!

5. Don’t blindly pay for upward links. First, practice the basics and run a small closed loop

I am also a veteran old investor. Later I said to myself: I will only pay to meet my current needs, and I don’t care about any favors. It’s really tiring to owe money all the time.

Especially when you haven’t completed the 0-1 closed loop of your business, don’t force yourself to integrate into a circle that is not suitable for you; what you need more at the moment is a circle that can improve your practical experience and get results.

That is to say, you should first do well in the traffic sector that you are good at, such as product development, conversion delivery, etc. After making money, you can then consider expanding the traffic + potential level. Then, you can consider integrating resources, mixing in circles, building connections, and leveraging the momentum to integrate other people's traffic to share the pie together.

Otherwise, what's the point of just getting to know the people? Without an exchange of equal value, you will still be worthless.

6. Continue to share sincerely and gain reputation and connections

When I started the Qishu Entrepreneurship Circle public account, I shared very hard and practical information without reservation at the beginning. You can also say that I have written down publicly the content that is only taught in other people’s paid courses.

It was also because of the selfless sharing of valuable content that about a month after I submitted an article to Renrenshishi.com, their editor-in-chief found me and helped me open a columnist status, which led to my later award as the “Popular Author of 2023”.

Also because of the continuous output of such hard goods, the official account that I have run for more than half a year has helped me attract thousands of fans in the private domain, including many colleagues in the IP field. I have to say that after the official account is public, as long as the recommended traffic can be continuously obtained, the effect of attracting traffic and adding fans is really great. After all, the only full-content platform that can recommend traffic to WeChat QR codes is the official account platform.

Of course, I never try to sell to all the fans who have added me on WeChat. I hope that they can pay for their current needs, or truly pay for the value I can provide.

Instead of letting them think that everything is suitable, and then buying paid courses randomly, but in the end, they can't use anything...

5. Make the business model light and pursue small but fine, small but beautiful

Since you have chosen the path of super individual IP, that is, a one-person enterprise, you must make your business model light and refined in terms of energy.

I don't aspire to do anything spectacular. It's enough for me to do small and beautiful things around my core competitiveness. At the same time, I firmly believe in the law of 1,000 true fans.

After the product system is initially built, I will focus on the following three things:

• From the perspective of personal IP, create a unique and recognizable personal brand, and continue to invest in learning and networking.
• From the perspective of traffic acquisition, we continue to create high-quality content in exchange for content traffic from major self-media platforms, and then use both efficient paid/free precise traffic
• From the perspective of user service, don’t try to earn money from all users. Selling products to the right people can reflect their value. Regardless of the product, quality is the first principle, and try to exceed expectations as much as possible!

VI. Conclusion

I also often remind myself that building a self-media IP is a process of continuous accumulation. We must adhere to long-term values ​​and do things that are valuable in the long run; maintain ignorance, keep moving forward with an empty cup mentality, stop internal friction, and embrace the power of sudden feeling.

For something like self-media, which has compound interest, can continuously amplify its own light, and even bring incremental business, it is worth anyone's time to accumulate.

In addition, selection + method + focus + execution + review + persistence , these are also the 6 core keywords that I think can help you get continuous results.

The road is long and difficult, but if you keep on keeping going you will reach your destination.

Thank you very much for recognizing the value of my content!

Author: Qishu Entrepreneurship Circle; Source Public Account: Qishu Entrepreneurship Circle (ID: 1096030)