Preface
Why did I write this book about TikTok
Hello, my name is Dizi. I graduated from Case Western Reserve University (graduate student in intellectual property law) and have been an entrepreneur in China and the United States for many years. Since 2018, I have started Amazon-related business in the United States with my domestic partners and was responsible for marketing in the US market. At the beginning of 2020, I returned to China and established an independent station team within the cross-border company, and put all my energy into studying the development of independent stations.
When I usually get together with my friends in China, I rarely mention what I do, because I always feel that cross-border and American business affairs are too far away from my friends. Talking about things that have nothing to do with each other when everyone gets together is a self-expression and a disrespect for each other’s time. So I am more learning how my friends are exploring and moving forward in China. I am very grateful to my friends for allowing me to supplement a lot of knowledge in the fields of domestic new media, private domains, etc.
In the past year, I found that more and more friends around me want to understand this field-TikTok and cross-border e-commerce. I can clearly feel that TikTok and cross-border e-commerce are no longer defined as “irrelevant to me” as before. On the contrary, everyone is interested in it. As I was asked more and more questions, I also went from replying to messages one by one at the beginning to sharing online and offline.
I found that everyone would repeatedly mention some of the same questions, such as: Is it a good time to enter TikTok now? Why? I have learned some Douyin gameplay. Can I use it directly on TikTok to get traffic? My business has encountered a bottleneck in China. I want to sell my products abroad. What should I do? My employees and I are not very good at English. Can I do cross-border business and TikTok? I want to take our company’s products to TikTok live broadcast room to sell. Do you think it can be sold?… In fact, I am quite happy because I gradually feel that my friends need me in their careers. In the past, when my friends talked about my business, they only felt “unclear but powerful” but “irrelevant to me”, but now, my experience can help them. Another reason is that as the cross-border industry has received more and more attention, it used to be only related to large import and export trading companies, but now small individuals and ordinary Chinese companies also want to actively participate, which makes me more confident in this industry.
It didn’t take long for me to be happy, and I found that everyone was not going smoothly on this road. Many friends who have established teams to do cross-border business have invested hundreds of thousands or millions of yuan in this project, but they have not been able to find the direction. Their idea of seizing the opportunity to expand overseas markets is good, but cross-border is an industry with a high threshold for one person, and having a product cannot solve all problems. In the absence of experience, it is very easy to step into the pit just based on the passion for TikTok. For example:
How much budget should I use for this project? What should I do if I can’t feel the end of the investment cost?
Which trading platform should I use to undertake my traffic? I can get traffic, but what if the monetization is very poor?
Should I position this project as social e-commerce? Can this model last?
I don’t have much budget, I just want to start a small business, can I still choose this track? Did I choose the right product for the overseas market, and how should I optimize the supply chain?
What should I do if the traffic of live streaming can’t be increased and the transaction volume is also low?
How to establish medium- and long-term competitive barriers so that the risk resistance of this project can grow synchronously?
Should I build a brand? What if I don’t have a budget?
……
At first, I helped my friend’s company to diagnose and come up with solutions for free; later, I couldn’t arrange it, so I summarized the common problems into documents and sent them to them; if they still couldn’t be solved, I would make an appointment for special one-on-one consultation and coach-level incubation. After consulting and incubating many students and companies, I found that everyone had no answers to the specific implementation level, such as how big the project should be, how long the cycle should be, how to configure the team, and what difficulties would be encountered.
I was very anxious because most of these projects were loss-making, ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions. So I really want to summarize the answers to these questions and establish an overall understanding of TikTok and cross-border e-commerce for everyone.
In addition, there are several very important reasons that made me determined to write this book.
1. I don’t want you to just blindly chase the “trend”
During this period, many students who had never been exposed to cross-border and TikTok told me about their experiences. They were attracted by the attractive slogans: “Don’t miss this trend again! Hurry up and join the international TikTok! This is TikTok three years ago! There are still many opportunities, and it is still a blue ocean! Are you still regretting missing the dividends of TikTok three years ago? Now the dividend period of TikTok is in front of you! Hurry up and join us!” So, without saying a word, he paid a lot of money to buy courses, memberships, and partner projects, thinking that he could take advantage of TikTok’s east wind to soar to 90,000 miles. But the fact is: after he paid the money and deepened his understanding of TikTok, he found that he did not have the foundation for cross-border business, and he needed to spend at least one million to build a team, and there were countless mountains waiting to be conquered. At this time, it was too late to regret paying so much money, and he could only be forced to act as a distributor to attract more people to pay the bills and earn back the lost money through commissions. Cross-border and TikTok, this “initial dream”, had to be abandoned, thus missing the right time to enter the market.
The wind makes people excited, but those who really want to take off with the wind should guard against arrogance and let themselves learn the ability to fly first. They fly higher with the help of the wind, and even if the wind passes, they will not fall to the ground and die.
I actually don’t like to say the word “wind” because whether it is a “wind” or not, the meaning behind it is nothing more than two aspects: one is whether there are many people in the bureau and whether the timing is early enough; the other is whether the market size will become larger and larger in the future.
Even if we start to lay out when both conditions are met, there are still opportunities and challenges. The opportunity is that foreign competitors on TikTok are not at the same level as domestic ones, and TikTok e-commerce is still in its early stages of development; the challenge is that in the early stages of the platform’s development, many blank markets are still relatively immature, and users’ awareness, cognition and habits have not been well cultivated. The earliest merchants who enter the market, if they do not have a strong product reputation or other ways to survive, are likely to burn their own money but make wedding clothes for the latecomers. So I hope that every cross-border entrepreneur has his own barriers and the ability to survive independently, and seize good opportunities on this basis, rather than just blindly joining in to chase the “trend”, which will greatly increase the risk.
TikTok is a good choice, but it has different practices for different people: for cross-border seller teams (more money and more people) and for individual entrepreneurs (less money and fewer people), the two groups of people are different from the layout cycle to the size of the project closed loop, from the strategic layout to the setting of the monetization method. This is why many people are scrambling to become the “pig” on the vent, but in the end they become the “dish” in other people’s bowls. We need to first establish an overall understanding of this platform, understand what monetization methods are available, which one is suitable for us, and other information, so that we can make a wiser choice.
Second, help friends who are new to TikTok avoid pitfalls
When TikTok first appeared, I was very excited because it was another marketing channel for us cross-border merchants. And I have always liked to study domestic Douyin and am willing to buy various online and offline courses to learn. Douyin has led the trend of short videos and has also made so many businesses popular. In order to do Douyin well, everyone has developed eighteen martial arts, which is really amazing. Now the international Douyin TikTok has come out, and its content is still relatively simple and rough compared to Douyin. So I thought: If I use the Douyin method I learned in China to do TikTok, wouldn’t it be a dimensionality reduction attack?
At that time, our company’s main business was Amazon, and we had just added the independent station section (the definition and function of the independent station are explained in detail in Section 2 of Chapter 7 of this book. Friends who don’t know what an independent station is can find the answer in this section). My team and I were still learning and exploring the marketing of the independent station. When I found the opportunity of TikTok, I immediately thought of getting traffic from TikTok to drive traffic for the independent website and use content to leverage free traffic. We carefully made product demonstration videos, used various special effects for post-production, and posted them on TikTok, looking forward to our account becoming popular overnight.
But the data was very unsatisfactory. We updated it every day for a month, and the number of views was only a few dozen, and the number of views was only more than 2,000. I didn’t see any customers entering my independent website to make purchases because of TikTok. Seeing that the down-to-earth “right way” was not easy to take, we tried some “shortcuts”: “moving” other people’s works to TikTok, spending money to invest in traffic, paying crazy attention to others to get others to follow back, buying fans and likes, creating some unconventional content, etc., and tried them all. Now there is traffic data, but it is not very helpful for commercial realization. I looked at these data and felt uneasy, just like looking at a castle in the air of false prosperity. The only use is to make myself look great when I brag about it. But only I know that this way is not long-term and the values are wrong.
In the following time, my idea was repeatedly confirmed: these traffics not only could not help me make my account better, but would make my account worse and worse, and we have been suffering from the backlash of these bad traffics. So I suspended the operation of these accounts, and asked the team members to return to their previous positions and focus on other marketing sections of the independent station. (I summarized these “shortcuts” and the corresponding consequences and wrote them in the first section of Chapter 4 of this book.)
I knew very well that the real reason why I couldn’t do TikTok well was that I was not capable enough. I just did it based on dreams and blueprints, without doing in-depth research and analysis on TikTok, and without really mastering its core underlying logic. This would not work. No matter how much traffic TikTok has, it has nothing to do with me.
So I calmed down and dug out the course notes of the previous study of Douyin’s recommendation algorithm and logic, understood the reasons why an account can be created and traded, and looked for benchmarking accounts on Douyin and TikTok, and disassembled and analyzed the accounts and videos worth learning one by one. I learned and practiced by myself, without the assistance of a team. Because I know that if I get used to leading a team, I will become lazy in some things, and in the process of exploring a closed loop, there are some things that others cannot replace.
I learned account positioning, fan tags, and content improvement, and I insisted on operating the account according to these methods every day. After two months of persistence, I had 1,386 accurate fans of my own TikTok account, and the basic viewing volume increased from 100~300 to 800~2000. This small result gave me hope and made me feel that as long as I persisted in optimization and adjustment, there would be a qualitative change.
But not long after, I experienced the “black swan” event of Amazon’s business: more than a dozen stores in the US and UK were closed one after another, the money in the account, the goods floating on the sea, the inventory of overseas warehouses, the employees who had nothing to do due to the stagnation of the store, and so on. It suddenly became my biggest headache. I had to suspend my research on TikTok and focus all my energy on dealing with Amazon’s problems.
One night half a month later, I had almost dealt with the problem, and felt that I could finally come to my senses and re-arrange the company’s business. I lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling, and re-examined this “encounter”: the reason why my store was punished by the platform was because I used to acquiesce in the operation to take shortcuts for the store’s ranking and sales data, that is, to brush orders and good reviews. This approach is the same as when we first started TikTok a few months ago. We all used crooked ways to surpass competitors instead of really spending time on our hard-core strength to defeat our opponents. In the end, you have to fill the pit you dug yourself.
So when all these crappy things were solved, I re-sorted out all the company’s business models: I made a break from the parts that were not solid in basic skills before, and after clearing Amazon’s goods, I only kept the brand independent station business; I clarified the company’s core values: do difficult and correct things, and strengthen your hard power in any business segment in a solid way, and prevent any management and employees from using crooked ways to find shortcuts in the future.
After I dealt with all this, I opened the account that I had operated carefully before. I was surprised to find that the message area was a red number of “99+”, the number of fans had increased to 1812, and there were dozens of comments in the comment area asking: “How to buy products? Are there any new models? Why haven’t you updated recently? I like your work very much!” There were also users who went to my account homepage and clicked on the independent website link to place orders on their own. This made me more certain that I was on the right path.
So I recruited the TikTok team according to the new standards, and studied and explored the five dimensions of product strength, content strength, traffic acquisition, operation strength, and brand strength, and made detailed reviews and adjustments (short videos are based on weeks, and live broadcasts are based on each show). I also summarized the five core strengths of TikTok and the ways to improve them, and wrote them in the second chapter of this book.
We created 23 accounts in half a year (two of which had millions of followers), and the works of all accounts were played more than 200 million times, bringing more than 300,000 clicks to the independent site. Among them, more than 7,000 users left their email addresses on the independent site’s EDM (email marketing) page to subscribe to our promotions; more than 3,000 people placed orders on the independent site, and achieved $150,000 in GMV (sales) from TikTok alone. But at this time, TikTok’s sales were just a general channel among the many channels of the independent site, because the sales of several other channels such as advertising and Internet celebrity marketing were much higher than TikTok.
Later, the small yellow car and live streaming were launched in some countries and regions, and the international Douyin began to layout the global e-commerce field. At this time, I realized that it was time to increase investment in TikTok. So we added the TikTok live e-commerce team, opened the Shopify video cart and live cart (internal beta) in the United States, and referred to the logic of domestic Douyin e-commerce to carry out independent product selection, supply chain optimization, anchor selection, live broadcasting skills polishing, live broadcast room visual optimization, etc. After another nine months of full investment and continuous adjustment, I led the team to complete the closed loop of hundreds of TikTok accounts from registration, account creation, operation, live broadcasting, precipitation of private domains to repurchase, upgrade consumption and referrals, and achieved a sales volume of tens of millions (RMB) for a product and millions (RMB) for multiple high-gross-profit products for the independent station through the TikTok single channel. However, we stepped on many pitfalls in this process, and often ruined the results that had just started because of our unfamiliarity with the platform. I will ask the team to organize and record every pitfall and accumulated experience and lessons. I will even put a price on each pitfall. If you lose 20,000 yuan, it is worth 20,000 yuan, and if you lose 50,000 yuan, it is worth 50,000 yuan.
I will write these “clearly marked” pitfall experiences in this book without reservation (I have summarized 21 pitfalls and provided corresponding solutions and pit avoidance guides). If it can help you avoid any of them, then it is worth your time to read this book.
Third, it is within the three areas I am best at
Tim Ferriss mentioned in the book “Tools of Giants” that if you want to achieve outstanding achievements, you probably have two choices: the first choice is that you practice a certain skill to the best in the world (such as the top 5% of the industry), so that you can have a certain barrier. But it is very difficult to do this in this era of involution, and only very few people can do it. The second option is that you can choose two skills and practice each skill to the top 20% in the world, which is relatively easy. There are very few people who have two skills that are ranked in the top 20% at the same time, because the top 20% x 20% in the overlapping field of two skills is the top 4%.
For example, Adams in “Tools of Giants” is not the best painter in the world, but he can reach the top 20%; he is not the best joke writer in the world, but he can also reach the top 20% in this skill. Now he combines these two skills to draw “Dilbert Comics”, and there are very few people who can do this.
We often hear people joking: I am the best cook among basketball players, the most handsome among cooks, and the best among the handsome ones. Maybe this joke can play a role in misaligned competition when chasing a beloved girl, but such jokes are often not linked to our commercial realization. If we can make good use of our multi-faceted advantages and find a perfect combination point, we can give full play to our advantages in misaligned competition.
When I reviewed why I was able to find the results on TikTok, I found that this was not a coincidence, but because it was at the intersection of the three abilities I am best at.
1. Personal understanding of the American market, culture, and consumption habits
I often mention a word: Internet sense. It refers to our understanding and grasp of this platform and users. Many big names on Douyin know very well how to choose topics on the Douyin platform to attract more people’s interest, increase click-through rate, completion rate, etc., and these abilities are also needed in TikTok. But for many players, they have no experience of living abroad, have not really dealt with foreigners, and are unsure of what they like and dislike, and have no Internet sense, which is what we often say “not getting the point”. Internet sense requires a long-term and large amount of “grinding” to slowly develop. One of my employees who works on TikTok gave me feedback: “I bought a lot of TikTok courses, basically all the ones on the market, and I have listened to them. But I always feel that my basic understanding of TikTok users and this market has not been built up, which is a bit like a castle in the air.” This is because my employee herself lacks Internet sense. She has listened to a lot of theoretical things in the courses and learned how to do it, but still can’t “get the point”. I realized that their training cannot be just “technique”. Although this can solve small problems and can serve as “hands” or “feet” in the team, it can never become a “brain”. So in the process of leading them to do TikTok, I will output the underlying things and the culture behind them, so that they can cultivate their own Internet sense of TikTok in the process of solving problems. Therefore, in this book, I will also output these contents to readers where necessary. This is a slow and steady process, but it is definitely worth it.
2. Continuous study and research on domestic new media and content power
No matter what social platform you are on, in order to attract more exposure, in addition to simply and crudely placing advertisements, you must continuously produce good content. Because each platform competes with each other for user usage time. They push different content to users with different interest tags. Users who like this content will spend more time on this platform, and even become more and more addicted.
Fortunately, domestic new media platforms represented by Douyin have achieved more mature and full development, and you can also find a lot of information worth learning to improve content power. I spent a lot of time studying and researching, and then putting it into practice. This is very helpful to me, because repeatedly polishing the foundation of improving content power in China is an important factor in my ability to explore the results of TikTok in a relatively short period of time.
3. Experience accumulated through hard work in the cross-border e-commerce industry
In recent years, a large number of people outside the industry have joined TikTok, and many people have gained a lot of traffic, fans and likes on TikTok through their own abilities. But overall, more traffic is obtained, and fewer traffic is monetized. Many people who enter the industry spend money to sign up for courses, buy equipment, and recruit teams. They feel the pleasure of being an Internet celebrity and are excited when they see the “99+” written in the message column, but after calculating the accounts, they find that they have no way to smoothly monetize and return their investment.
If you want to set up a cross-border monetization closed loop, you need to know a lot of industry knowledge about cross-border e-commerce. From product selection to logistics, from public domain to private domain, from pre-sales to after-sales, from short-term to long-term, etc., there are too many industry cognitions to learn. Although it does not have a very high cognitive threshold, it is very easy for people outside the industry to step on the pit. If you step on the pit, you will not only lose money, but also lose the opportunity cost. So I will also supplement the necessary industry knowledge and underlying logic of cross-border e-commerce in this book, so that you can not only learn how to do it, but also gradually form your own decision-making ability.
For me, TikTok is the combination of my three abilities. Using it, I can not only open up customer acquisition channels for my cross-border e-commerce business, but also write this book to share with everyone, which is a very happy thing.
Before writing this book, I made a lot of preparations. Because I hope that this book can not only help companies that want to go overseas, but also allow individual entrepreneurs to choose a path that suits them. So I not only summarized my own and my team’s experience, but also specifically listed all the current monetization methods on TikTok for this book, and found 100 excellent benchmarking accounts for analysis and disassembly. In order to ensure that the methods I gave in this book are effective, I asked the team to re-register a batch of new accounts, covering multiple different account types such as influencers, games, knowledge payment, and selling goods, and also including different industries and fields. For these accounts, I specifically re-operated according to the methods in the book to ensure the effectiveness of these methods. Not only that, after writing this book, I repeatedly polished and modified my expression, hoping to explain TikTok to you in the simplest and most understandable language. TikTok is developing rapidly, and its policies are changing with each passing day. So I asked myself to refine the underlying logic and thinking methods, not only to solve the current problems, but also to form my own judgment on TikTok. No matter how the policies change in the future, I can deal with them freely.
In the first and second chapters of this book, I mainly talk about the important cognition of TikTok. Before doing TikTok, you need to understand it clearly and lay a good foundation; Chapters 3 to 5 mainly talk about how to obtain traffic and monetize from three aspects: accounts, short videos and live broadcasts; Chapters 6 and 7 are analysis and precautions for the monetization paths of two different groups of people. It starts with epistemology, the middle is methodology, and the end is practice.
If you have never systematically understood TikTok, I suggest you use this book as a textbook to learn. I hope that after reading this book, you will not only be able to make a name for yourself on TikTok according to the solutions I give, but also have your own judgment in this industry because you have mastered the underlying logic of new media and cross-border e-commerce.
If you are a Chinese business owner who wants to open up overseas markets for your company, I suggest that you not only read every chapter of this book yourself, but also give a copy to every employee in the company, and then select the overseas project team based on their feedback. If you have a friend who is looking for a new way out for the company, you will give him this book and he will definitely think it’s great. If you want to communicate with me about TikTok, please contact me on WeChat: dizitk.