Single Week 1w+|The Long-Tail Value of Independent Sites Ignored by Newcomers: From Niche Media to SEO. W22-23

This Week's Progress

Global E-commerce

1. Opened Amazon, lost $40.
2. To play Amazon smoothly, DIY registered a UK trademark, lost over 1000 RMB. Currently waiting for response.
3. Independent site received 2 collaboration emails:
   • One wants to do dropshipping with me, currently have 2 stable sub-agents. The more the better.
   • Another received a sample collaboration request from a well-known UK local magazine's review blog. They wanted a cheap one, I sent them an extra expensive one. This kind of collaboration should be as many as possible. Trading samples for review blogs is amazing.
4. Didn't give up, continued to run Google standard shopping ads for over a week, about 100 RMB daily budget, not optimistic, turned it off. Still didn't give up, opened another Ireland campaign, still not optimistic.

Personal Brand Media

1. Max community exceeded 100 members!

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The Long-Tail Value Ignored by Newcomers: From Niche Media to SEO

I once tried to explain what SEO is using familiar social media environments.

Today I want to talk again about the long-tail value and sustainable growth value of global selling independent sites.

Let's start with personal media as an example. I currently average about 10 WeChat friend requests per day. Not many, but stable.

1. How Do Followers Find Me?

Conventionally, there are two main ways:

1) Social Media Platform Recommendation Feed

Based on algorithms, recommending content you might be interested in on your homepage.

2) Social Media Search

For example, when users encounter problems, they choose to search for solutions on Bilibili or Xiaohongshu. If my content matches their needs, they'll see it.

2. The Ratio and Pros/Cons

Each social media platform has different attributes and user behavior habits. For WeChat Official Accounts, about 15% of traffic within a month comes from search.

Recommendation feed traffic depends more on whether my content matches mass needs and appeals to human nature.

The advantage is that when you learn to create attention-grabbing hooks, you can get decent traffic. The downside is traffic isn't precise, and monetization value is low.

Search traffic is extremely precise, since users already have a need before searching for your content.

3. What Does This Have to Do with SEO?

SEO literally means Search Engine Optimization. No matter how fancy people make this profession sound, its essence is still following quality content that matches user search intent.

So the search you're familiar with on social media and Google search follow the same basic logic.

Simply put, followers finding my content through social media search is the same nature as global selling consumers finding your products through Google search.

4. Why Is the Logic Simple But People Still Fail?

Still using personal media as an example, I'm a real individual seller. I've encountered every problem every seller faces, so I just need to collect these problems and organize them into guides. This way, when people later encounter problems and search for solutions, they can find my content.

What I need to do is continuously collect problems and continuously organize them into more user-friendly tutorial guides and publish them.

Is this process difficult? The main difficulties are three:

1) Do you really understand your industry, users, and market needs? (Expertise)

2) Will you "create for love" and consistently output free quality tutorials for at least a year?

Can you overcome the anxiety of not monetizing for a year and each piece only getting a few hundred views? (Persistence)

In global selling, will you persist for at least half a year to see SEO results?

3) Will you seriously invest enough time and energy into each piece of content?

From recording videos, writing, to editing and publishing, each time taking 3-4 hours? (Quality content)

In global selling, do you carefully polish each product multiple times?

You won't. You just randomly copy content; post on social media and give up if it doesn't go viral;

At this point, you're not doing e-commerce at all, you're just screening for fools. You're just waiting for a foreign fool to order garbage from your site, and you might not even be able to ship it.

5. In Today's Environment, Not Getting Rich Quick Equals Failure?

Admittedly, on social media, many scammers can use social media algorithms and human nature to create all kinds of misleading content, and the traffic is indeed explosive.

Exploiting human nature is their specialty. They know exactly what you want.

I randomly found a group recently moving from Xiaohongshu to Douyin: "Post-95s working from home on Xiaohongshu, one person opened 19 Xiaohongshu stores."

Post-95s persona creates age anxiety + working from home highlights no barrier to entry + exaggerated numbers make you think it's profitable

This type of content is everywhere, from e-commerce to AI, spreading stories of getting rich quick, and wanting to take you along.

This leads to:

Observers have unrealistic expectations, earning 5k monthly themselves but complaining after seeing the reality: "What? This only makes this much per year?"

Those trying it become extremely anxious: "Why can others get explosive orders but I can't? Is it because I'm not using some magic tool?"

Below the expectation of getting rich quick, they slowly give up.

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