I make money by running with internet celebrities

The profession of running as an escort for internet celebrities sounds very special and unpopular. The author interviewed practitioners in related professions to learn about their daily work content and the market situation of this profession. The article explains how this profession makes money from the three aspects of the work content of the profession of running as an escort for internet celebrities. Students who are interested can read on.

"You'd better reshoot this video. The cover is too crude and the text is not eye-catching. Also, change into something more upscale! Dressing like an assembly line worker to teach people how to make money is not convincing."

When I met Xiao Xia (pseudonym), he had just finished meeting with students in his private class in a cafe. Before I could exchange pleasantries, a voice call popped up on his phone, and the other party asked anxiously: "Teacher, what else do I need to adjust? If you don't send it to me, I won't be able to finish three before the end of the class."

Xiaoxia immediately pointed out several problems to her. When she said, "My clothes are not cheap," he interrupted her without hesitation: " It doesn't matter what you think. The important thing is to make Xiaohongshu users feel that they are expensive and believe that you are a rich woman. I will post two accounts later, and you can learn from them."

This is the daily work of Xiaoxia, a personal trainer for internet celebrity running companions. According to Xiaoxia, he needs to correct more than ten video assignments every day. "Each video is eight or nine minutes long. I can tell where the problems are and whether it has the potential to be a hit after just a few dozen seconds."

Before starting this business, Xiaoxia worked in a relatively well-known MCN agency, responsible for signing and incubating influencers. Last year, the company cut off a large number of low-end influencers due to the poor advertising business, and Xiaoxia's department was also laid off as a whole.

Xiaoxia, who has not found a new job, accidentally noticed that online side jobs are popular nowadays. Young people who also have difficulty finding jobs have begun to try part-time accounts and anchors, hoping to become an online celebrity and at best earn some traffic share.

Isn't this a chance for me to show my strengths? Teaching people how to make money is the most profitable business. Xiao Xia quickly picked up his old rice bowl, but this time he changed the way he ate.

1. You need to create a persona

Compared with marking video assignments, the most difficult thing for Xiaoxia is to guide students to establish their own personalities. "The majority of them are ordinary people without outstanding backgrounds and personalities." For example, Xiaoxia's new student Wen Yi (pseudonym) is an example.

The boy only had a college diploma and could not make a name for himself in the live streaming industry, so he had to work as a customer service representative at Hema Fresh. But reality did not completely shatter his dream of becoming an internet celebrity. When he was searching for a side job, he saw Xiaoxia's studio and immediately placed an order for private lessons.

Wen Yi's self-positioning is to inspire grassroots people, and young people from small towns can also leave their hometowns and take root in big cities. But Xiao Xia does not approve of such a character setting, "Nowadays, no one wants to see stories about suffering, unless they really sell misery. Especially since he wants to make emotional content, who would believe that the love experience of losers is useful?"

Of course, Xiaoxia did not completely deny the idea of ​​literature and art, but suggested that the other party should consider changing to the life track and do a series of themes such as "How grassroots can live well in big cities" with topics such as "Bringing food to work" as the incision. "It would be better to change the identity of Hema customer service to that of employees of a large company, so that it would be more interesting."

Xiaoxia told Hard Candy that his studio will give each consultant a personality test and provide some account positioning references. Traditional MCN agencies pursue efficiency and usually do not make such detailed plans for the contracted objects. Instead, they directly let the small Internet celebrities define their own personality labels. The team will then find the benchmark accounts and disassemble the creative routines to apply them.

Now that Xiaoxia is facing pure amateurs, the incubation model must be adjusted. This is also the experience he summed up in practice. "When the studio was first established, some students attributed their failure to become popular to the poor character design we gave them. In fact, it is not the case. The fatal problem is that the content is empty, boring, and has no explosive points."

Xiaoxia's team decided to further refine the preliminary work and make the process as complicated as possible. Although this did not bring any substantial changes, it was a great psychological comfort to the trainees. "Just pick some psychological test questions and give them a few alternative personas, and they will feel that they have gotten a bargain and are on the right team."

The more troublesome thing is that netizens are not as easy to fool as before, so more "evidence" needs to be embedded in the content to continuously increase the credibility of the blogger's persona, such as work badges, group photos, deposit photos, etc. In this regard, Xiaoxia's studio also provides paid materials and services. Students can pay a little tea money to eat and take photos with the little internet celebrities and use them in their own video assignments.

In the world of Internet celebrities, any information that proves one's strength can be produced. As he was talking, Xiaoxia showed Hard Candy the financial blogger he was running with. "She works in Beijing and has already bought two houses. She has seven figures in her bank account. These are all true information. But she didn't say that the house is in a fourth-tier city. She asked her friends to raise more than one million yuan, and she paid it back immediately after taking a screenshot."

In Xiaoxia's opinion, these students have good basic conditions, they just help with packaging, "Nowadays, you have to spend money to beautify your resume to find a job, let alone become an internet celebrity." Of course, he still emphasizes that the character setting must have a certain degree of authenticity, otherwise it will easily expose a sense of roughness and suspension in the later stage, which is not conducive to the long-term development of the account.

During the chat, Xiaoxia repeatedly persuaded Yingtangjun to become a blogger. "Your character is too easy to create. You earned six figures by writing novels in high school, and you voluntarily gave up the opportunity to continue your studies and the admission to an international prestigious university in college, and successfully entered a first-class art institute."

Hard Candy never knew his life could be so exciting. Xiaoxia immediately picked out several internet celebrities and bloggers: "This is nothing rare. Look at Xiaohongshu. Every person has fled big companies and given up a million-dollar annual salary."

2. Red is another price

Since you are a content creator, no matter how good the character is, it is just a skeleton, and you must use your works to give it a full body.

Xiaoxia firmly believes that most non-professional students do not have the ability to create hits. "The notes they write, from the cover to the title to the copy, are all a mess. The platform recommends a huge amount of content every day, and if it doesn't interest users within two seconds, it will basically be swiped away."

This is where the value of online celebrity teachers comes in. According to Xiaoxia, they provide private lessons to students through live broadcasts, videos, review sessions, free Q&A sessions, etc. They can promptly correct students’ creative problems and give targeted suggestions, “down to the color and font size of the cover.”

At present, the hot-selling courses of Xiaoxia Studio are private tutoring and full-staff training camp. Among them, the private tutoring provides more comprehensive and higher-quality services, including revealing the tone, mechanism and content logic of the creation platform, analyzing the specific process of starting an account and the guide to hot products, as well as investment skills and data testing, etc. The price is 8,888 yuan/month. If content review, fan operation and business docking are required later, the package discount price is 12,888 yuan/month.

The full-staff training camp is aimed at ordinary students, including account optimization, video courses and community Q&A. "It mainly provides them with internal electronic materials, so that they can learn the skills of lighting, oral broadcasting and editing, and reduce the information gap in the creative process. The price is 1,999 yuan per session. There is no targeted practice and explanation, and it depends more on the students' own understanding."

This is a slightly higher price than other companies in the industry, but Xiaoxia thinks his own studio is worth it. After he decided to become a web celebrity, he hit it off with two former colleagues, and found two friends who were short play writers and web celebrity agents. The five core members formed the current team, which is "much more formal than those makeshift teams that cheat people out of money."

After the studio was established, the first step they took was to make video courses, but there was a serious disagreement within the studio on this point. Others felt that using content logic to start the class would better reflect professionalism, but Xiaoxia insisted on talking about monetization in the first lesson, introducing how to make money using Xiaohongshu and video accounts , and teasing students' imagination of getting rich to the greatest extent, so that they can devote themselves to later learning more quickly and attentively.

"Students must feel that the money is worth spending, so that they don't back out right after the class starts. Not giving refunds is our service principle," Xiaoxia joked.

Judging from the information density of the course, the accompanying service provided by Xiaoxia Studio is indeed in place. They will guide students to shoot video assignments from the perspectives of creativity, framework, title, keywords, script, and even costumes and props, and give adjustment suggestions at every step. For example, as mentioned at the beginning, "What do rich women in Xiaohongshu wear to look noble?"

It can be seen that Xiaoxia is quite confident in his professional level, and he often shows me the good feedback from students. What impressed me most was that he said he got up in the middle of the night to modify the cover picture for a student, and the girl was so moved that she cried and sent him a banner that read "spiritual mentor".

This may also explain why Xiaoxia has recruited hundreds of students, but has only trained three mid-level Internet celebrities (with about 100,000 fans), but no student has asked the studio for a refund. Even if the students who dream of becoming Internet celebrities wake up after a month or two, they would rather believe that they have no luck, no talent, or "lack of fire in their lives", and do not deny the hard work and dedication of the teacher who trained them.

3. Who still wants to be an internet celebrity?

The three internet celebrities that Xiaoxia Studio has successfully supported are all female students who have just entered their thirties. They mainly focus on three tracks: healing, financial management, and workplace, which are also the three most popular creative directions of Xiaohongshu.

When talking about how he recruited students in the beginning, Xiao Xia showed a rare embarrassment: "I'd better be honest. The most mainstream way to do the business of accompanying Internet celebrities is to copy. Whether it is courses or operations, we can only follow the crowd during the promotion stage. After our studio got on the right track, we made a lot of adjustments to the course content, and the professionalism is obviously higher than that of our peers. There is no whitewashing, you can compare and feel it."

They found a lot of popular content on Xiaohongshu and video accounts, such as "You must know the underlying logic of making money" and "Don't waste time making hard money". They imitated and filmed "The Law of Attraction of Wealth" and "How to Make a Side Job a Main Business", implanted courses in appropriate locations, and then spent money to promote it into a small hit, successfully attracting the first batch of paying students.

In the past year and a half, 80% of the hundreds of students they have served are female clients, and most of them want to try their hand in the fields of emotions, finance, workplace, and healing . "Now there are also some brands or entrepreneurs who come to consult. Business is not good, and they probably want to hype their personal IP. This is also the direction our studio will work towards in the future."

Xiaoxia told Mr. Yingtang that male students generally cannot humble themselves, their comprehension and stress tolerance are not as strong as those of female students, and they are quite unwilling to listen to advice.

"Before, a male student insisted on doing a scumbag training program on Xiaohongshu. There is nothing wrong with this idea, but the emotion should be the opposite. You should position yourself as a friend of women and teach sisters to identify scumbags, instead of actually teaching brothers to become scumbags. On Xiaohongshu, you are trying to please low-value male users. Isn't this ridiculous?"

So far, most of the male students who have been running with their studio have failed. The most successful one is a relationship blogger who talks about how to develop a good intimate relationship from a male perspective. He now has only more than 2,000 fans. "I suggest boys go to video accounts. It would be embarrassing to run Xiaohongshu - the most popular bloggers have to sell their erotic features, and we can't give students such a shabby lesson."

Even if it will miss the male market, Xiaoxia Studio's business focus is still firmly on Xiaohongshu and Video Account. "These two places are still traffic depressions, and there will be a support bonus period for new accounts." Moreover, Xiaohongshu can receive advertising with just a thousand fans, which is almost impossible on Douyin.

In Xiaoxia's words, they are not competing with MCN agencies for food, but are essentially doing sideline training. "It is common for people with a monthly salary of 10,000 yuan to easily earn 1 million yuan a year. As long as we grasp this point and build a sideline kingdom in their dream space, we can continue."

In order to make the imaginary kingdom more real, Xiaoxia will also invite senior Internet celebrity agents, personal brand business consultants, million-dollar live broadcast room operators, outstanding students, etc. to come to support the party and accompany the successive sideline workers to continue running on the road of Internet celebrities. Of course, this is also another price.

Author: Liu Xiaotu Editor: Li Chunhui

Source: WeChat public account "Entertainment Hard Candy (ID: yuleyingtang)"