How can you become a star without money?

Chapter 31 Heizi Speaks
"Hello Mr. Wang, I am Ma Ruo. I am 165 cm tall and weigh 45 kg. I specialize in shooting sweet-style women's clothing and have 5 years of modeling experience."

"Hello Mr. Wang, I am Feng Jiao. I am 168 cm tall and weigh 45 kg. I specialize in shooting pure and innocent style women's clothing. I have 8 years of modeling experience."

Having heard that they were assigned by the client, Ma Ruo and Feng Jiao dressed up carefully for the company interview. Although they had already transferred to Tianhuo Media, they had been recording programs in Nanjing and only returned to Shanghai a few days ago. Today was their first time reporting to the company.

“Mr. He is away on a business trip. On behalf of Mr. He, I welcome the two of you to Tianhuo Media,” Wang Yao said with a smile.

"Hehe, thank you, Mr. Wang. I have a job as soon as I get back. I appreciate the company's support." Ma Ruo is from Beijing and has a rather witty way of speaking.

Although Feng Jiao and Wang Yao are from the same hometown, Feng Jiao grew up in Shanghai and is more like a girl from the south.

"Although there are work arrangements, the pay is average, since it's just online photography," Wang Yao explained.

“1000 a day is already very high. Before we signed an exclusive contract, online shoots only cost four or five hundred a day. The pay for participating in variety shows was high, but after all, we only shoot for two or three days a month. Modeling is more stable.”

Ma Ruo smiled and asked, "What style of women's clothing is the client shooting this time?"

"It's not women's clothing, it's men's clothing and socks," Wang Yao said, pointing to a pile of clothes in the corner of the photography studio.

"Huh?" The two of them were startled at the same time, thinking they had misheard.

Should I hire them to shoot menswear photos?

Do men buy things online?
Seeing the two people filled with doubt, Wang Yao gestured to Ni Ni to help them change clothes and try out the shoot.

A short while later, the two changed their clothes, turning loose men's T-shirts into dresses on their upper bodies and revealing bare legs on their lower bodies, with their men's socks pulled up to their calves to become athletic socks.

Combined with their looks and physiques, their boyfriend-style outfits create a striking contrast and allure.

"Mr. Wang, is it really men's clothing?" Ma Ruo asked doubtfully, tugging at the hem of her clothes.

“I was surprised by the client’s request,” Wang Yao said with a smile.

"Mr. Wang, is this client doing legitimate business?" Feng Jiao asked timidly.

"Probably. Anyway, we'll just take pictures based on the main images from Taobao, but the client requires that each piece of clothing have a one-minute demonstration video recorded."

Wang Yao pointed to Luo Hongming and Liu Hao, who had digital cameras strapped to their heads behind him.

"Show a video? Show what?" Ma Ruo blinked.

“A 360° shot is fine; you don’t need to cooperate.” Wang Yao smiled. “Let’s do a test shoot first.”

He then instructed the two temporary photographers for the day to begin test shots.

Taobao photos all follow a set pattern. Ma Ruo and Feng Jiao are both professionals, but since this was their first time shooting menswear, the photos they took using womenswear poses looked a bit strange.

Wang Yao could only personally instruct him on which poses would best showcase the clothes.

Pull up the collar to show off the looseness of the neckline.

Pull up the hem to show off the elasticity of pure cotton.

Squat down to cover your legs and show the size of the clothes.

Sit down and pull on the socks to show their quality.

After the three basic techniques were taught, Ma and Ruo quickly grasped the knack.

"Now I know why clients use female models for menswear shoots," Ni Ni said, arms crossed, her face full of admiration.

“Selling things is simple. You only need to do two things: first, make the target customers see it and be willing to look at it carefully; second, make them feel that the price is cheap and be willing to try it,” Wang Yao said with a light laugh.

"Don't even mention men, I, a woman, have to look closely. The client is a genius." Ni Ni stared intently at Ma Ruo, who was tugging at her collar.

Ni Ni naturally knew who the client was, because she had personally selected these clothes from the inventory market over the past two days.

They are all classic men's shirts, including base layer T-shirts, long-sleeved and short-sleeved shirts, and even vests. The styles are similar, with only slight differences in prints and designs.

However, the styles of men's clothing are basically only different in terms of crew neck, V-neck, and lapel.

Men's socks are only distinguished by color.

Because they are inventory, each style is available in quantities of several hundred to several thousand pieces.

After calculating the prices, the cost of one piece is less than 5 yuan, and the socks cost 1 yuan a pair.

100,000 yuan can buy more than 10,000 pieces of clothing and tens of thousands of pairs of socks. With such strong purchasing power, Ni Ni almost doesn't recognize money anymore.

Moreover, Wang Yao priced these clothes at 59.9 yuan for two men's outfits plus five pairs of socks, with a gross profit margin of 60% including 25 yuan for express delivery.

A shipment of goods worth 100,000 yuan can generate approximately 5000 orders, with sales exceeding 300,000 yuan.

If it can actually be sold, it would be quite profitable.

Ni Ni was worried that she wouldn't be able to sell them, but now it seems that if she uses this method to attract traffic and showcase them, they should sell quite well.

"Let's go, I'll take you to learn about store operations." After watching them take a few sets of photos and get into the swing of things, Wang Yao led the reluctant Ni Ni back to her workstation.

"Taobao just started testing a new push method this year called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. It is a method that uses the inherent rules of search engines to optimize website structure and content, thereby improving the website's natural ranking in search engine results."

For example, since the outfits Nazha is wearing are all in a British style, we can add keywords that the target audience would search for to the product title, such as 'export,' 'British style,' 'high-end,' and 'original order.'

For example, the title of this outfit could be "Trendy European High-End Design Suit for Export," which contains several keywords and could potentially be searched multiple times by the target audience.

However, to rank higher, you need to use a different method, which is to boost sales and positive reviews. This can be done by spending money, but to make money, you still need to optimize your keywords properly. Wang Yao demonstrated this himself.

Ni Ni looked intently, her brows furrowed. "So, the longer the title, the higher the probability of it being searched, and the higher the probability of a sale?" "That's the principle, but the core is that keywords match the corresponding audience. For example, if you're a girl who likes Korean style clothing, even if you find this British style, you won't buy it, right?" Wang Yao nodded.

"I think I understand, it's about stacking buffs." Ni Ni smiled like a little fox.

"Your job today is to arrange these products according to the keyword combinations I just mentioned and put them on the shelves. For the same style, you can come up with many names. If you don't know which keywords are good, you can search for similar styles with high sales volume on the website," Wang Yao said.

"Boss, you've entrusted me with such an important task? I'd better learn from you first." Ni Ni said somewhat timidly.

She was confident in choosing and matching items, but she was unsure about this kind of work that she had never done before, especially since it directly affected her earning potential.

"When doing things, you shouldn't learn first and then do, but rather do and then learn. You have to learn by doing and do things at the same time. Moreover, doing is learning; otherwise, you're just a theorist."

Wang Yao reassured him, "Just do it yourself first. I'll oversee things from behind. What are you afraid of?"

“Received, boss!” Ni Ni smiled brightly and began to think about how to arrange and combine them.

Taobao has only recently started using this SEO logic, and very few sellers have begun to utilize it. The search ranking strategies are borrowed from Baidu's paid search ranking.

The Taobao Express channel, which Taobao previously partnered with Yahoo for, was an immature product due to its over-reliance on external traffic and low cost and accuracy. Its poor performance led to the loss of a large number of paying sellers.

This SEO search logic was introduced to compensate for the inaccurate allocation of paid traffic on the site. The 'keyword matching bid' directly elevated Taobao Express to a paid platform, realizing the earliest form of consumer profiling.

This also spawned a huge Taobao affiliate industry, giving rise to early content-driven product recommendation platforms like Mogujie and Meilishuo.

In this stage of e-commerce, using keywords and paid advertising (like Taobao's direct traffic service) will generally bring surprising ROI data, as long as you are willing to spend money. It is a period of high returns where you can't lose money no matter how you invest.

Therefore, Wang Yao doesn't need to worry too much about the possibility of losing money or not having sales. For Taobao now, any paid seller is a VVIP. Even if the targeting is not accurate, the platform will manually supplement traffic to enhance the seller's feeling of spending money.

However, three years later, Taobao began to treat paid sellers like pigs, even to the point that they were treated like servants. The more you paid, the more you lost, but if you didn't pay, your account would be immediately cut off, and you would watch helplessly as others surpassed you in sales.

In the context of e-commerce monopolies, this is a case of big stores bullying customers. If you don't top up, there are plenty of others who will. And at the most frenzied stage, if you wanted to top up your account, you had to beg the Taobao shop assistants for money.

Unlike now, Wang Yao recharged 5000 yuan yesterday and got a dedicated personal assistant.

The first batch of sales from Xiaoka's online store are now available for withdrawal. In the future, it will be possible to withdraw 5000 to 2 yuan every day, which can be considered a stable cash flow.

The mini-card store has been online for a week and has accumulated sales of over 15 yuan. It now has a stable daily sales volume of over 3000 yuan without doing any marketing.

The main reason is that no hidden cards have been drawn by fans. Zhou Cong has already released four hidden cards of Girls' Generation, but no one has claimed the prize money. The post on the forum has already reached 100,000 posts.

It's likely that the fan who won the lottery is unwilling to pay back the money.

I'm really impressed by Girls' Generation's rich female fans. If no one claims the prize by the next day, he'll have to put on a show with Zhou Cong and sell it himself.

Otherwise, if the activity is delayed for too long, its effectiveness will be diminished.

I estimate that if we do two more small card marketing campaigns and stir up some arguments among fans of several K-pop groups, the sales of small cards can be stabilized at 5000 per day.

By then, the clothing store should be up and running, and we'll be waiting for Ma Ruo's "If You Are the One" to premiere on the 17th.

Leveraging the organic traffic generated by the popularity of Ma Ruo's materialistic topics, we pre-purchased CPC clicks from Baidu or some smaller websites to drive traffic directly to the Taobao store using Ma Ruo's title. We then observed how much of this general traffic could be converted.

In this way, the online store can basically guarantee a daily cash flow contribution of around 1 yuan, which can be considered as achieving initial financial freedom.

Once we have cash flow, we can simply replicate the model and expand. At that time, we can not only make money by opening our own Taobao store, but also take on Taobao store operation services for other brands, making money from both the B-end and C-end. We aim to achieve a monthly turnover of one million before the Chinese New Year.

"Bro! Finally, someone pulled a hidden card!"

While Wang Yao was idly playing Prototype in the afternoon, Zhou Cong sent him a message with a screenshot of his Baidu Tieba ID and contact information.

"I'll contact her to transfer the money. I'll send you a screenshot of the transfer later, so you can impersonate her on other forums." Wang Yao cheered up and added the other party on QQ.

'Yi Ai Pani'

I was stunned when I saw the nickname. Isn't this that rich girl from Danzhou? How lucky is she?

The other party approved the verification in ten minutes.

'Vanilla Youth: Hello, is this a hidden card release? Could you take a picture of the details? The barcode on the back.'

'Yi Ai Pani: Really, are you going to accept 1? [Image]'

Vanilla: Sure, yeah, the card's fine. Send me the bank account number, along with your name and phone number.

To prevent the first batch of hidden cards from being illegally printed and disrupting the marketing plan, Wang Yao printed a 13-digit barcode on the back of each hidden card. The barcode was not specially applied for; he had the printing factory print it arbitrarily without any rules.

However, this method can only be used once, because as long as one copy is circulating in the market, driven by profit, someone will definitely try to exploit the loophole.

But it doesn't matter anyway, it's a one-off deal anyway, as long as we can make a quick buck.

'Yi Ai Pani: Account XXX, do you have Pani's hidden card? If so, we can trade, and I'll make up the difference.'

'Vanilla Girls: I don't have any Pani either. I'll contact you when I have extra. I've transferred the money; you should receive it in about two hours. Please check your mail. The courier will deliver to this address.'

'Yi Ai Pani: Aren't you afraid I'm a scammer?'

'Vanilla Girls' Generation: How could someone who likes Tiffany Hwang be a fraud?'

'Yi Ai Pani: TAT, I need a super-rich person to carry me.'

Wu Xuanyi, who was far away in Danzhou, slapped the bank card transfer text message in front of her mother and shouted with her hands on her hips.

"Hate him! See if I've made money by being a fan of celebrities!"

(End of this chapter)