2020-10-19 Why did I give up doing community work temporarily?

As soon as the title comes out, it is inevitable that I will be criticized again. First of all, this is not a personal complaint. It is about some logical reasoning of my personal project selection. It is not meant to belittle or advocate at all; secondly, there are many successful experiences. See, there are few lessons from failure. I climb stairs every day to hang out with groups and fill my brain with practical information, but I still can’t do well as a Taoke. Perhaps, changing the air and listening to different voices can actually make my cognitive system more sound and analyze problems. More rational.

Recommended people: Junior players who are preparing or currently engaged in social Taoke, the big guys don’t have to waste time

Note: The social Taoke mentioned in this article refers specifically to the WeChat community Group refined order issuance to Taoke, used to distinguish agents, rebates, QQ groups, content Taoke, etc.

The following is divided into three parts: 1. Why do you do it; 2. Why give up; 3. Next How to go.

1. First of all, why I decided to start a community.

First, it is simple, easy to use and easy to copy. (Practical)

Second, it is risk-free, can be made bigger, and is sustainable. (Security, accumulation, scale)

Third, contact the terminal and realize the private domain. (Profit maximization, diversified realization)

I believe everyone can list many, and different people and different stages have different reasons for choosing. Compared with traditional industries, it is simple, has high investment, quick return on investment, low risk, low education cost, stability, and everything else about it. These are the reasons why millions of active Taobao customers choose it. I won’t go into details here. .

2. Let’s focus on the second part, why I decided to give up doing community work temporarily.

I believe that there are many money-making projects in the world. If you have to be serious, there is nothing you can't do. Take myself as an example. I have been a doctor, done direct selling, ran a business, worked as a housekeeper, worked on a construction site, worked as a cleaner, did financial management, and invested. In 2016, I entered the Internet, worked in a community, and started a business. The store group was trained, sold software, hired agents, and finally returned to direct sales. But my dream has always been to be a sit-in at home.

If you think that I am the kind of person who thinks differently, only dabbles in things, has never been tortured by traditional industries, has an impetuous heart and does not know how to endure hardships, I have nothing to say. Let me give you a few figures. After studying medicine for five years, I worked in a hospital. In less than a year, I have been reading books on medicine and nutrition for ten years, and I am still studying now. I am tired of climbing stairs and vomiting blood, but I still have the mind to read medical books and listen to nutrition classes in the middle of the night. It can be said that I have not worked hard; I have roughly surpassed I have been working in the industry for ten years. I entered the industry in 2008. I only completed the last batch of goods in 2018. I lost hundreds of thousands a year. I persisted in the days of losing money even if I didn’t make money. In the first five years, I held 300 parties in 365 days. I have to attend almost every meeting, rain or shine (offline meetings every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights, family gatherings every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, 2-3 hours each time, several outings every month). I still don’t change the brand at home, and I don’t like to listen to it. When others say it is not good, it cannot be said that you are not persistent; when you are in finance, you open six branches a month, travel to three or four counties every day, drink two or three meals, and trade your life for money and use money to buy your life, you are not not desperate; when you are playing investment, Following a group of old players to investigate every day, they lost millions in a month. They were either asking for debts or on the way to asking for debts. They wanted to burn a bunch of expired contracts in their hands. It was a lesson learned; building a store group, pulling network cables, and opening The company sells software, conducts testing, engages in OEM, builds APPs, engages in local marketing, and is a general agent. It cannot be said that it has not been implemented ----- it is a peanut business. It has not made any money for three years and it is still foolishly persisting. It relies on losing users. After leaving the agency, memories are an indescribable pain. Youth is in a hurry, which step is not taken seriously, which step is not to make it big, but only when you miss enough and the pain is enough, you will pay more attention to the lessons of failure instead of infatuation. Successful experience.

Bringing it back, I just want to tell everyone this paragraph. I am not talking about it on paper, it is purely conjecture. For a certain group of Taobao customers, at a certain stage, the community should be cautious!

1. Especially those who are new to the industry;

2. Individual Taobao customers who have transformed from agency or rebate models, have no team, and have weak capital budgets;

3 , the alliance commission is low (within 50,000 as a reference), or the small Taobao customers who lack other sources of income are ready to expand into the community;

4. Other Taobao customers who are ready to enter the community Taobao industry, but lack the following Some or all of the factors:

The ability to obtain low-cost traffic, reliable traffic purchasing channels, certain financial strength, community operation and transformation capabilities, product selection capabilities, investment-free meat-only resources, necessary Countermeasures for peer resistance include rebates, agency and other fan engagement measures, and diversified monetization capabilities.

5. For non-powerful players who want to make quick money but are unwilling or unable to re-invest in larger batches, one problem is their mentality and the other is their ability.

First of all, understand a concept. The essence of business is a technology. Like all technologies, its underlying logic is composed of basic modules one after another. For example, learning to drive consists of 4 subjects and dozens of The specific action steps are composed of hundreds of cognitive points, such as straight line, reverse warehouse, hill start, acceleration and deceleration, U-turn and turn. There is an observation period from easy to deep and finally hitting the road; for example, in martial arts, no matter how awesome the martial arts are, they will eventually be demolished. It can be divided into a few simple and simple steps, such as boxing, palm, footwork, positioning, exertion, etc.; the same goes for learning to sing, including musical notation, vocalization, high and low notes, transposition, rhythm, etc. In the same way, being a Taoke also has its underlying logic, which is the traffic, conversion, product selection, operation, first order, fission, repurchase, retention, etc. that everyone talks about every day. These basic elements constitute the difference between masters and novices. The core lies.

Let’s break it down one by one:

1. Traffic

This is divided into three capabilities,

First, If you have money and are willful, just buy it. Buy, buy, buy, cash out, cash out, cash out, as long as you don't lose money, you will make money, calculate the production cycle, and continue to reinvest. At this time, the community becomes an investment target and an asset, and its operation is far better than most financial products. Many little-known invisible bosses in the industry have used this trick to quickly rise to the top and enter the fast lane.

Second, it is a technological giant, exclusive in attracting traffic, and self-produced and sold. It’s funny to see the lowlifes worrying about traffic. They have so much traffic that they can’t digest it and sell it out. Compared with the first type, the traffic cost is close to zero anyway, and the backend can be attacked casually, and it will be over as soon as the money is paid by violently issuing orders. Who has the time to chat with you in detail and talk about everyday things.

Third, fission maniac type, give me a fulcrum and I can move the earth. I have really seen this kind of awesome people, who don’t buy fans, can’t attract traffic, and rely on their relatives, friends and best friends to create dozens or hundreds of groups. They understand the essence of fission, that is: behind the users are all users. In particular, the core of the agency system is nothing more than one sentence: find agents among users, and find users behind the agents, and there will be endless shortages of future generations.

Okay, compare yourself, which of the above categories do you belong to? Without traffic, there is nothing. This is a hurdle that cannot be circumvented in the Internet. To put it absolutely, if the traffic is great, nothing is a problem. If the traffic is not good, everything is a problem. Take myself as an example. I have joined a lot of big boss collection groups and selected products. The chatter in the group is ridiculous, but I still can’t place an order because it’s just three melons and two dates. It’s meaningless. The big boss just wants to increase the output by 1%. You can test it repeatedly, because the scale is large enough, and a 1% increment is more than your stock, so it is most important to recognize yourself.

2. Product selection

After passing the traffic limit, it is time to select products. Before the traffic reaches a certain scale, product selection is insensitive. This is also my current state - selection The product is useless. But as long as you are a big boss and you are doing paid traffic, product selection is particularly important. Every advertising space is worth money, so don’t dare mess around with it. You may say, isn’t it just those parameters, sales, reviews, dynamic scores, store levels, etc., but when you have exhausted all your energy to choose, you are looking forward to opening the alliance backend and seeing the explosive orders appear. For a moment, you realize that reality is so real. You are suddenly in chaos. I guess it’s not that simple!

Yes, if it were that simple, those micro-business sellers would not change products again and again. Products are the core of business. There are numerous books on product selection, and you can do it by intuition. You can apply for a product manager job.

I remember a boss said that their company had recorded all the hot-selling items that Taobao has promoted in recent years, and compiled them into a book by category, brand, historical price, commission, order volume, etc., and asked the product selection department to Once you see a product in the group, you can quickly know whether it is worth recommending, whether it is the lowest price, what similar substitute products are available, and what the commission is, so you can make a decision quickly. If you are an individual Taoke, or a newly established or newly transformed company, you may have never heard of it, and you simply cannot understand the logic behind their huge orders, which investment bosses they are fighting with, and their free services. Where do orders come from and how much does it cost? You can join the collection group for free. Do you think you are taking advantage of it, or are you acting as a free channel provider?

Yes, many merchants have established their own social groups, and the number of meat orders has become less and less. I remember when the inspection first came out, down jackets were given to you for free, with how many inspection quotas came with it. Now , the 0.1 free order only left the mobile phone holder and a few unknown facial masks

The expert took action, accurately and ruthlessly!

If a rookie clicks too hard, bullets will be wasted, or even no bullets will be left.

3. Operation

Before I came into contact with a certain big boss, I never understood what operation was. Until I read some tables, those meticulous data, precise division of labor, and strict execution system, let me Taoke for the first time in so many years, have the perspective of the boss. Yes, it is the perspective of the boss, a holistic and macro view. The community I run. It's as if you have been practicing horse stance for a long time and finally see a complete set of boxing techniques, connecting those detailed steps into a set of realization plans. All your efforts revolve around this, and finally you see water slowly flowing out of the pipe. , a complete set of money-making techniques appears in front of you, accurate and perfect.

But just like you have learned subject three, you will still make a lot of mistakes once you get on the road. Operation is a novice on the road. Controlling ten or one hundred communities is like driving a car, even if you master everything The skills are clear and logical, but it still takes a long running-in period to achieve the state where the person and the car are integrated and the driving is easy. In the meantime, there is still a high chance of gear shifting, stalling, fan loss, and group death. What's more, how many Taokes have gone through systematic training in subjects one to four, and have been trained in the basic steps of traffic drainage, product selection, copywriting, operation, transformation, fission, and retention, before they started to operate a community?

Don’t think I’m making a fuss out of a molehill. On the way to becoming a master, this is a must. The lessons you missed will have to be made up sooner or later! Either we take the initiative to make up for it, or we get it back for you in terms of output.

Of course, all steps are interactive. Sufficient traffic and good product selection can reduce operational pressure; good product selection and operation can also improve traffic utilization efficiency. But often, newcomers are short of this and that. If you are doing rebates, it is basically enough to have good traffic. Product selection does not involve it, and the operation is much lighter. Just manage the account well. If you operate an agency model, you only need to provide education and training for the agents, which is actually a type of operation. Relatively speaking, the rest can be accomplished through agent self-fission and self-purchasing. To be a community player, you must be an all-rounder. This is my simple understanding.

4. Fission

In fact, each section can be written as a separate article. There are many subdivision factors, and fission is no exception. In 2016, I randomly created a group of moms with 20 or 30 people. In two days, I created two precise groups, with an order rate of more than half. Even after recruiting 30 people, I only gave them a gift worth 30 or 40 yuan. Wool and my colleagues almost made trouble. No, it's very pure and beautiful. The time is 2020. In five years, the industry has been in chaos. To be honest, if I were a novice and watched the big guys discussing F accounts, discussing the cost of acquiring followers, and discussing how to blow up groups and steal people to death every day, I wouldn’t want to do it. Of course, every industry has problems, but it also reflects the current status of Taoke. Those who can make money are either those who have built the country before, or you have something special, and you will never use the ordinary methods of ordinary people.

Take the currently popular group fission of free orders, with 200 people, free orders + gifts can fission a full group, which is considered good. After spending money, it is normal for the group to be dissatisfied, and the worse ones may even fall into the group. There were hundreds of people. Fission is originally intended to reduce traffic costs, but many people are doing it. Taking into account the time and labor costs, it is not as cost-effective as buying it directly.

5. Retention

Finally, let’s talk about retention. What determines retention, I think one is service and the other is value. The two together constitute the brand.

In the stock era, what can retain users in the future must be brand, that is, who users can ultimately remember among many communities. The impression they have on you determines your survival cycle. Behind the brand lies strength.

A great brand means service beyond service and value beyond value.

Looking at the entire industry at present, the community is mainly retail investors. Similar to the domestic stock market, brand concentration is low. The only function of a large number of zombie communities is to distribute traffic. The homogeneity is serious and not If I copy you, you copy me, or we copy others together.

For services that go beyond service, on the one hand, we need to return to the shopping guide, that is, the question of "what to buy". From this alone, many problems can arise, such as whether the promotion method should be to pile up products or to focus on refined products. Promote inspection, or collection page, or check-in inspection, let users participate, or introduce new methods such as live broadcast; on the other hand, why buy from you, that is, user experience. You can imagine that you are a shopping mall, how to build your own brand, and make people think of services such as "there are no fakes here", "here are all brands", "three guarantees here", "the ladies here speak nicely", etc. I have heard many Taoke say that we are just porters of coupons. If you have any after-sales problems, go to the seller. This is like you are a shopping mall. If you have a problem, go to the manufacturer. Don’t go to me. It’s useless to have a receipt. It’s the same reason. As long as you have profit sharing, you will have corresponding responsibilities, which is something that small Taobao customers generally cannot do at present.

Value beyond value. In addition to buying and buying, do this group of people have other needs, such as a sense of belonging, a sense of accomplishment, social needs, business cooperation needs, etc., such as my previous social In the group, I tried to talk about some topics about health and wellness and children’s education. In fact, many users like it, but this is still version 1.0. Can it be decentralized and filter out opinion leaders in a certain field from users, so that users can Generating interaction is a value that transcends value and is a necessary way to maintain the long-term survival of the community.

Sometimes when I go to watch a game, I wonder what a circle is and what a community is. Golfers are teammates on the court and friends off the court. Buyers are actually a group of people with the same interests. If they are isolated from each other, it cannot be called a community. Sooner or later, the group will die.

Okay, let me stop talking about other sections. Let me summarize why I decided to temporarily give up community self-operation:

First of all, it is stuck in traffic. The cost of traffic is rising. I have no money, no traffic drainage technology, and third, I am not good at fission. To be precise, I have to buy followers and add red envelopes to waive the cost. A fan may cost more than ten yuan, which requires strong back-end monetization capabilities. Yes, according to the current situation of novices, 2 cents per unit output is not bad, but it will take nearly two months. Plus Taoke's own payment cycle, are you willing to wait for nearly three months? The key is, even if three months have passed and your capital is back, it is not certain whether the community can still remain active. There is a high probability that the money has come back and the group is almost dead. You have developed a skill and found out how to make money. It’s not you, it’s who you think about; then drain traffic yourself. To put it simply, even the time and energy spent learning a technology may not be what you can afford. Not to mention the various thresholds required for drainage, do you have anyone? Bring, the resources you need to prepare, how long your method can last, etc.; let’s fission, and you will go back to the strange circle at the beginning. When you find that everything is not as easy as you thought, it is easy to look at the height of this mountain. , a few months have passed, and the results have ruthlessly proved that you still have no traffic, and you still can’t do it.

Secondly, stuck in product selection.

I still know what level I am at. Ladies and sisters basically don’t buy the things I like. I am not a person who likes to buy things. The so-called crowd portrait and accurate product selection, haha, of course. If you don’t have a great team yet, you will know that selecting products is just deceiving yourself, especially if your traffic is not good, you don’t even think about selecting products, let alone hiring people.

Third, stuck in operational transformation.

Well, even if there is no problem with your traffic products, it does not mean that you will issue orders or continue to issue orders. As mentioned before, even if you learn to drive, it does not mean that you can drive on the highway or participate in competitions. Look at those operational experts and those data tables. If you feel dizzy just looking at them, then you are like me. It is probably difficult to go too far on the road to refinement. Of course, it is most beautiful to operate a few groups or more than a dozen groups by yourself and live a small life. Don't talk about amplification. The two prerequisites for amplification are either the company team or ignoring refinement.

Fourth, the card is retained by repurchase.

Users are all chasing brands, and they will follow whoever has the strength. If you don’t have the strength, you can just be a small IP. The key is to make it big, to make it big and brand it, and there is a hundred thousand in between. Baqianli, to give you the simplest example, you can’t even unify the most basic copywriting format. To make a poster, you have to go to Taobao. There is no emotion, no style, no service, no division of labor, and no care for innovation. , the only value is to steal users' time and rape them. How stupid a user would be to stay in such a group for the rest of his life? So what if there are three or five free orders every day? What if you only ship one product every day? What users want is never the few dispensable free orders in the picture. Besides, you also know that you can’t ship too many or for too long. , if you can’t send it well, no one is stupid.

I won’t write down the fifth and sixth numbers. In fact, they are stuck everywhere.

This is my personal situation and does not represent anyone else. If you feel that you are talking about yourself, then you should be more cautious. It is possible to lose money even if you farm, let alone Taoke. The most important thing is that after being a Taoke for so long, I have found several outstanding problems. One is neglecting health, sitting for long periods of time, staying up late, excessive use of eyes, long-term radiation, long-term bowing, etc. Of course, this is a common problem among Internet people. Taoke seems to What's more; another one, ignores the family, is full of traffic, issuing orders, the man forgets to go home, the woman forgets to take care of the baby, haha, it seems that the original intention of being a Taoke is to take care of the family, but forget it while doing it, Taoke are the most diligent group of people I have ever seen, even more diligent than migrant workers. The body is tired, the brain is tired, the heart is tired, everywhere is tired!

Third, finally, let me briefly talk about the follow-up plans.

On the one hand, Taoke is still a good industry, especially in the Internet, which is rare in formality, long-term, and allows people to settle down and work on projects for ten years, so I have no plans to leave. I am taking a break to practice martial arts. Instead of hitting everyone you meet and being injured repeatedly, it is better to practice in seclusion and practice the basic skills first. Slow is faster. Wrong actions are still wrong even if they are repeated ten thousand times. Some actions are easy to learn and can be learned by doing, such as fission. Some actions are difficult to learn. It is a comprehensive ability, such as community operations;

On the other hand, Taoke is a business that relies too much on traffic. It can only win by relying on scale, and personal explosion is slightly insufficient. Besides Taoke, there is a vast world where individuals can relatively move around. The road should be getting wider as we go, and it may not be too late to take a detour.

So, don’t be misled by the title. It’s just an individual, it’s just a stage, it’s just self-operated for the community, there are many things that still need to be tempered.

This is 5,700 words long. It is purely my humble opinion. You are welcome to discuss it in private. I always like to look beyond the industry and look for patterns in failures. In 2020, everyone is turning to the community. At this time, we need to hear different voices. At the end of the year, there will definitely be a group of big whales who rely on the community to thrive. At the same time, there will also be little shrimps who are choked by this torrent. What kind of person are you and whether you are suitable? You can compare your basic skills to see if they are solid or not. Making money is a technical job, and there are rules to follow. As long as you comply with the rules, the action methods are in place, and you continue to practice and polish, you will surely succeed.

Thanks to my peers and seniors who have accompanied me and guided me all the way. The counterattack has not yet been successful, and Taoke still needs to work hard! Come on together!