A few years ago, "I have struggled for 18 years not just to drink coffee with you" once resonated with me. The cruelty of real life in the city often leaves people living at the bottom at a loss. Although many people are passionate and use their dreams and Stick to the faith that comes from the depths of your soul, but time flies, your appearance grows older, and everything remains the same. When I read that article, I had been a spam webmaster for three years, and two years later, I am still a spam webmaster. What is a spammy webmaster? It is a type of webmaster who relies on certain technical means, plagiarism of other people's content, or even rogue methods to obtain website traffic and make money from website traffic. In the melting pot of the People's Republic of China, spam webmasters may have played an indelible role like cannon fodder for the development of the Internet industry, but today, such people have become parasites or cancers of the Internet, and I , is one of them.
In 2005, I was 23 years old. After studying hard for more than ten years, I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and a high school Chinese teacher qualification certificate. I don't like the golden lace on my diploma, which is far less attractive than a real job. If I don't want to go back to my hometown to farm or be "gloriously" sent to teach in remote mountainous areas, I have to find a job. At that time, I was very high-spirited and always felt that the outside world was beautiful, so I went to Shenzhen with my girlfriend. What about you? You're not in a hurry. At that time, you stayed in the provincial capital. Because of your parents' relationship, you easily entered a news unit to work as a clerk. When we broke up, you told me that we worked together after we separated. Do you still have a literary forum? It was a forum we did together in the first semester of our senior year. You know a little bit about technology, and I like to do some copy editing and planning work, so the literary forum was born, which I participated in. The first website used Dongwang’s program.
The trees fell and the hozens scattered, and the birds threw themselves into the forest after eating. Although I thought I had good qualities in all aspects, I encountered a problem in Shenzhen. I couldn't find a job for three months, so the living expenses of the two of us depended on my girlfriend's monthly salary of 2,000 yuan, which was not bad. I didn't have a computer and I wasn't willing to spend it. The money went to the Internet cafe. During those days, the literary forum was no longer maintained, and the domain name was not renewed. You called me from the provincial capital and told me that your newspaper was going to build a website, which would be a perfect match for your strengths. I said, brother, come on, recruit me when the value rises.
Just longing. What I have to face is the reality of life. One day three months later, I finally found a job, helping a small electrical appliance company to sell walkie-talkies. The salary was 800 yuan plus commission. I spent a month using my legs to visit all the factories and office buildings in Shenzhen. There were very few products sold. I often reflected on why my work was always in vain. One time, I was walking back to Shenzhen from Dongguan. When passing by Fenggang, a salesman selling websites asked me to exchange customer business cards. I was sitting on a dirty chair at Fenggang Bus Station and chatting. He told me that maybe I hadn’t found the target users and that I might try online marketing. I was so excited that I slapped my thighs, so my girlfriend and I suddenly spent all the money we had. I bought a desktop computer for my property and installed China Telecom’s 80 yuan/month network at lightning speed.
Because in the past I could only manage Dongwang forums, write blogs, etc. My initial process of building a website was very difficult. I first searched on Baidu for questions like "How is a website made?" and "What is the source code?". I learned about it while building the website, and gradually I got to know the Three Musketeers, and also learned about After learning ASP, it took about 2 or 3 months to build a website with four or five pages. At that time, it seemed that Huyi's free space and second-level domain name were used. I didn't know how to do promotion at that time, so I just went to major forums to post my own advertisements. Within 2 or 3 months, people occasionally called me through the mobile phone number I left on the website to ask about the purchase of walkie-talkies. , but only took one order, selling 20 Motorola GP88S walkie-talkies. That was the first big order I signed with that company. Because by the end of 2005, I decided to change jobs and submit my resume on JOB88 while working. This time I entered an Internet company because I knew that if I wanted to do well in the Internet, I had to work in a place with many experts.
This is an Internet company that has very low wages but encourages innovation and tolerates failure. After I joined in early 2006, it took me about a month to really understand all the business of this company. Basically, the company's business includes traditional mobile phone chain stores, Internet, SP and other businesses. At that time, the SP business was in the transition from the golden period to the recession period. After I joined, I was mainly responsible for the editing of a MMS magazine and the content of several local portals. Since I am a formal literature major and like to write some articles, I quickly got started with these tasks. In addition, three months after I went there, my department head took a leave of absence due to pregnancy. I was lucky enough to be promoted to The director of the project team and friends who are familiar with SP may know that before 2006, although the SP business once became the main profit model of several major portals and many Internet websites, it was from that time that SP actually began to decline. Therefore, in addition to Coping with the content editing of the MMS magazine, maintaining the relationship with Shenzhen Mobile, monthly settlement, mass SMS promotion, etc., I basically spend more than 60% of the day idle. There are about 10 people in the company's SP business department, and a few of them have Internet technology backgrounds and I play very well. At that time, we all had a lot of fun together. The business I was doing once became one of the main revenue sources of the business unit, so my boss raised my salary to 2,800.
The days passed slowly. One day in March 2007, a famous person from the technical department told me that I should register some good domain names now. The .cn domain name now only costs one yuan, so I registered one from a certain city. domain name. In my free time, I was busy learning website building techniques from Ming Qiang and Shi Gong. Around April 2007, my first independent website was launched. It was the classified information portal "Liuyang Window" for the prefecture-level city in my hometown. ".
After the website was launched, I spent all my time at night and all my free time at work on my website. At that time, I didn’t know A5, Ggadsense, or webmaster statistics. I just hoped that when people search for " When the keyword "Liuyang" is used, my website can rank first. After reading a lot of articles written by seniors, I slowly started to try to do SEO, became more and more familiar with ASP, and began to slowly improve my PS level and animation production level. Later, CNZZ webmaster statistics were added. The number of website traffic checks per day was no less than 10 times. The number of IP addresses visited by the website gradually increased from a few to dozens to hundreds. The keyword "Liuyang" also appeared on Baidu and Google. Got to the first place.
Around that time, I started going to some webmaster forums and learned about some of the website’s profit models. In addition, my girlfriend always said that I worked on websites every day but could not make a penny, so I added the codes of several advertising alliances to the content pages of my website, such as Dark Horse Alliance, Yi Advertising Alliance, etc., but I never There was no way to get their money. The most hateful thing was that when I made more than 80 yuan for an advertisement from the Dotcom Advertising Alliance, I found that I had to give them an invoice before collecting the money. I was very painful and resentful. In the end, in my own Only ads from Baidu Advertising Alliance and Google Advertising Alliance are added to the website. (Baidu Alliance was banned permanently by Baidu due to misclick, and now I always use Google).
From that time on, I not only looked at CNZZ statistics every day, but also looked at how much money had been added to GG’s account every day. I don’t know when I started going to the A5 webmaster website every day. Gradually I understood the power of SEO. I remember that at that time, a keyword "Watching movies on Tudou.com. Porn" could bring me about 8 US dollars in income every day. Unfortunately, it only lasted less than a week. Baidu may have thought that I was using this keyword. I was cheating on my website, so I cleared all the included sites on my website, and I was K-ed.
K lasted for a long time, about 3 months. I was very entangled but persisted because the SP business I was doing in the company at that time could not continue due to the adjustment of the mobile policy. We had to find a new product to replace the nearly 2 million hole that year, so we Started a new product - an e-commerce website for 3C digital products. The death of the SP business made me understand how it feels when a person's child dies. I don't want my website to die too, because after all, I have been doing it for nearly a year and have accumulated a lot of local users.
Starting from the end of 2007, I started to get busy while running the e-commerce website for the company. Because I had to take care of building an Internet team (mainly training new people), I taught myself a lot of professional things, mainly online marketing. and e-commerce. Of course, my own website was not idle, because at that time I already had more than 80 US dollars in my Google account, and my website was deleted by K, so in order to increase my Google account to 100 yuan, I built nearly 10 websites in one go. , I would make websites with whatever domain names were available, such as Shenzhen Wedding Network, GeoChina, Shenzhen Maintenance Network, True Color Forum, Changsha Tong, Ali Diudiu, etc. I felt that there were too many dark sides in China’s website alliances, so I innovatively made one Website Alliance, focusing on the soft article marketing value of the website, established the "Soft Article Website Alliance". In just a month or so, the number of my own websites has reached nearly 10. In addition, I am responsible for the company's e-commerce website, In the operation of a local portal website and a health industry portal website, I was responsible for the normal operation of nearly 13 websites during that time. In addition to the normal 8 hours of work every day, I am busy at home at night adding pseudo-original content to multiple websites and doing SEO for each website. I basically go to bed around 2-3 o'clock every day, or I am forced by my girlfriend. Only then did he go to bed exhausted. As there were more websites, I discovered many profit models on the Internet, such as selling links, publishing soft articles, and channel outsourcing.
Days like this lasted until March 2008. Because the company's e-commerce website was engaged in 3C digital products, and in this segment, no matter how hard we tried, we could not compete with others in multiple areas such as price, logistics, and service. Competition from industry leaders such as Jingdong Mall and Beidou Mobile Network led the company to abandon the project and start planning a video website. At that time, my main job became writing short play scripts, participating in the filming and production process of video programs, and using Malicious software promotes video websites. I can proudly tell you that at that time, video websites had just emerged, and Tudou and Youku were far from as famous as they are today. At that time, we had already achieved the simultaneous live broadcast of our Far EasTone video skits on computers and mobile phones. I was very excited until one day my boss said that because we did not have an audio-visual license, we might be suppressed by policy in the future, so this project with an investment of nearly 1 million began to be shelved.
Around April 2008, we started to get bored, so we caught up with the craze of mobile Internet and built two WAP websites, one was 3G Supreme Network, which mainly produced pornographic novels, and the other was 51 website navigation. It happened that the vice president at that time planned to make a copycat mobile phone, so a few of us who were engaged in the Internet built the vice president's personal copycat mobile phone sales website in the company. I remember that Yahoo had not acquired Koubei at that time. The head of human resources of Koubei found our vice president and hoped to bring a team of us over. We began to think that we were talents, and we did not think that Koubei was just a category. Information website? So it finally didn’t happen.
Although the company encourages innovation and tolerates failure, I don't want to live a life where I just drink tea, chat, and play Kart Racing every day when I go to work. At the same time, I deeply realized that my Internet experience is still insufficient. This does not lie in Internet planning, operation or even some basic technologies. What I lack is the ability to turn the Internet into money. At that time, I was no longer optimistic about the model of Internet cafes + computer training + local website construction + local Internet portals. I began to be deeply convinced by Alibaba, Taobao, A8 Music Network, China Chemical Network and other websites that made money. I knew that I I need to go to a big Internet company to hone my skills.
In June 2008, I resigned and went to a large mobile Internet company. What attracted me to this company was its sales ability. I started as a sales representative. A month later, due to my strong training ability, I quickly became a sales representative. I was transferred directly from the sales department to the training center at the company's headquarters, where I was responsible for organizing training nationwide. Since mobile Internet and traditional Internet are the same, I got started quickly and was promoted to training supervisor after 3 months. There is a very good training system and good personal growth space in this company. Everyone can communicate well across departments. The company’s best sales methods are direct sales and conference marketing. Basically, the monthly sales can be It broke through 10 million, and the sales in 2008 were 150 million. It took about a year, and I learned a lot of professional knowledge. In the process of continuous sales, marketing organization, and employee training, I became very familiar with conference marketing. , direct selling, and mobile Internet. At the same time, during the training process, I had to turn the practical experience of the previous grassroots webmaster into a training tool that can be copied and disseminated, so I began to produce professional Internet training courses, mobile I have been running professional Internet training courses and various sales-related trainings for a long time in companies all over the country, training many professional managers, ordinary employees and newcomers.
There are many powerful people in this company, including in the management field, sales field, mobile Internet technology field, and Internet field. I continue to learn from them, and the company began to hire some professional consulting companies to provide professional knowledge such as performance management and project management. Training, I feel like I’m growing very quickly. But this was not enough for me, so I stepped up my self-study. In addition to maintaining my own website, I began to study marketing courses from masters such as Kotler and Trout.
In the first quarter of 2009, because some of the sales staff closest to the branch were what my boss called "people who can hear the gunfire," I was transferred to the company's core business unit as the "National Sales Management Director." Mainly responsible for national sales management, marketing planning, sales incentives, etc. of mobile Internet products. It happened to be in 2009 that the sales of the business unit I was responsible for sales management exceeded 200 million. I don’t know how much credit I have for this. , but I am very happy because my salary has been increased to more than 4,000. In addition, since then, I have basically received advertising fees from Google every month.
This is thanks to a colleague of mine, who was also a grassroots webmaster. He was responsible for the operation of a product at that time, and the product exceeded 20 million from planning to operation in 3 months. This can not but be said to be a miracle. At that time, we went to the corridor every day to smoke and talk about marketing. After discovering that we had similar interests, we started talking about the Internet. It was he who suggested that I adjust all GG ads on the website to image format, because 100% of the images will trigger ads with just one click. , and only less than 10% of the text area will trigger ads. I tried it and found that the income that used to be less than one dollar per day jumped to about 4 dollars per day. Other than that, I just place one 336 image ad per page because that works best.
Around May 2009, I started to collect money from Google. Although many of the websites I had were closed due to registration or because the virtual host provider ran away and was irresponsible, there were still a few of them, basically every month. I can receive money. Such days lasted until March 2010. There were rumors about Google's launch in China and CNNIC domain name registration and other remarks that were not conducive to grassroots webmasters. Including, virtual host providers often disappeared inexplicably, and GG's income was greatly reduced. Sometimes two You can only receive money once a month.
In April 2010, I began to doubt whether the commercialization of mobile Internet could be realized in a short time. If my suspicion was correct, then it would be difficult for the products sold by the company to realize customer value, so I decided to Resigned. I don't want to deceive consumers. At this time, I already had five years of work experience, and my thinking was beginning to mature. While working in this company, I used my spare time to build dozens of websites one after another. Of course, they were all done for fun and testing, because I increasingly found that "experiment is the only criterion for testing truth" is very correct.
At this time, many opinions emerged in my mind, such as:
"The core of the Internet lies in positioning." This view originated from Mr. Trout’s positioning theory. At that time, I started to visit webmaster forums such as A5 and Laggards, and began to study the number one websites in various fields on the Internet. I firmly believe that it is the same in the Internet field as in the traditional marketing field. In the final analysis, a website must meet the unique needs of certain customer groups in a certain area, and each market segment or segment can only accommodate a few websites. The rest will eventually be eliminated. This view of mine is published in my article "Website Positioning, the First Step for a Successful E-Commerce Site".
"Everything on the Internet is e-commerce." Because no matter what kind of website you build, in the final analysis, it will involve profit, but it is not an "e-commerce site" in the public sense. A website that cannot make profits is not a good website, so I believe that "everything on the Internet is e-commerce."
"E-commerce websites must meet the unique needs of customers," because no matter what the content of your website is or how positioning it is, if you cannot meet customer needs, you will have no value in existence and development. This view was published in my article "The C2B model will definitely give birth to great companies in the next 10 years."
The maturity of my thoughts and the combination of practice and theory made me feel that I was slowly maturing. I began to get tired of the low-level website profit model of advertising alliances that harmed customers' feelings. In June 2010, I felt that e-commerce should still dominate the world in the next 5 to 10 years, and there are still many opportunities for e-commerce websites to succeed in many industry segments. In addition, I was going back to my hometown to get married, so I resigned from Shenzhen. Returned to Changsha.
After returning to Changsha, you called me and told me whether it was time to leave. You went to pick me up at the airport. You told me that it was easy to build a website for a news organization back then. There was no need to worry about filing, no need to worry about servers and hosts, and even promotion funds were not a problem. Five years later, you have reached the position of Internet Technology Director of the news unit, and the company has equipped you with an Audi car. We looked at each other and smiled. Over the past five years, we have both experienced too much.
You asked me what my plans were when I came to Changsha. Should I start my own business or continue to look for a job?
I said, starting a business is too difficult. You said, that's it too.
When I got home, I started thinking about my future. I was already married and it would be very stressful. I have been a grassroots webmaster for five years, and I am still a grassroots webmaster. I am optimistic about e-commerce. There are many good opportunities but I will not choose to start a business. I have too many concerns. If my e-commerce site is built but the relevant departments want to shut it down, there is nothing I can do. I am an ordinary citizen in China and I need to abide by the law. A grassroots webmaster is actually a street vendor operating without a license, but one day he will be caught by the urban management, and even the rice noodle stall will be kicked out or taken away.
In fact, I don't need special care from the government. I just need a space, a quiet space, where I can work hard on my career without breaking the law.
In 2010, I went to a traditional enterprise to do e-commerce. I chose a small industry to do e-commerce for a certain agricultural product. I hope to be the first in this small industry. My three-year goal is to be 20 million, I know this is not a dream, because I understand and have confidence.
For the majority of grassroots webmasters and brothers and sisters who are struggling together in the Internet market, my suggestion is still to do e-commerce. If you can't start your own business, you can do e-commerce for small and medium-sized enterprises. The prospects are very good; at the same time, you can also do online integrated marketing communication, e-commerce outsourcing and hosting, e-commerce training and coaching, e-commerce marketing planning, e-commerce operation promotion, etc. E-commerce website construction, e-commerce strategy consulting and other e-commerce-based services are all great market opportunities and will allow us to continue to grow. Currently, I am planning a network-based "virtual company" and hope that the majority of webmasters can join our "local wisdom".
I really hope that there is such an organization that can speak for grassroots webmasters; I really hope that there is such a leader who can see the innovative, diligent, and persistent beliefs of grassroots webmasters; I really hope that the relevant management departments Be able to simplify some complex processes based on reality; I really hope that there is a sky above the heads of the grassroots webmasters, which is not only covered with dark clouds, but also often cloudless.
Because I have struggled for five years not to be a garbage webmaster! Because none of us grassroots webmasters want to be a garbage webmaster. (Author Liu Tao, the first local wisdom, please indicate the source for reprinting: http://www.sztrainer.com/ ) Everyone is welcome to reprint and spread it widely)
Author Liu Tao's personal space This article only represents the author's views and has nothing to do with the position of Webmaster.com.
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