@10xmylife: Today I want to share with you how I earned 100,000 yuan through self-media. Last year, encouraged by a few friends, I started trying to take commercial orders through self-media. From this year, I actually began taking it seriously. By the end of July, my income had just exceeded 100,000. So in this post, I want to share my journey from the first order to...

Today I want to share with you how I earned 100,000 yuan through self-media. Last year, encouraged by a few friends, I started trying to take commercial orders through self-media. From this year, I really began to take it seriously. By the end of July, my income had just exceeded 100,000. So in this post, I want to share with you the complete process from starting to take orders to final settlement. Behind the Scenes of Commercial Collaboration First, let me briefly explain why bloggers are able to receive commercial orders. Behind a commercial order, there are usually four roles: the brand, the intermediary, the blogger, and the content platform. The brand has products that need promotion, so it hands the promotion needs to an intermediary. The intermediary then finds suitable bloggers, who produce content according to the requirements, publish it on the platform, and finally complete the settlement. At present, most of my income comes from Xiaohongshu (RED). If you want to take commercial orders on Xiaohongshu, the first step is to activate 'Pugongying' (Dandelion). Take the rules when I activated it as an example: once your follower count exceeds 1,000, you can apply to activate Pugongying, signaling to the platform and brands that you are open to commercial collaboration. After activation, your account enters a status available for collaboration, and then intermediaries may start coming to you with inquiries. Preparation Before Confirming Collaboration For example, you might see a message like this in Xiaohongshu's system notifications—it's an inquiry, and you can directly add the contact information. Why is it that most of the time, the ones contacting you are intermediaries rather than brands? Because brands rarely contact ordinary bloggers directly. Unless you're a top-tier blogger, or your account has very unique advantages and the brand feels you're especially suited to the project, only then might they arrange for an internal employee to liaise with you directly. More often, brands hand their promotion needs to various intermediaries or media agencies. After receiving the brief, the intermediary looks for appropriate bloggers based on brand budget, account type, and content direction. During this process, you'll often hear a term called 'rebate' (fandiǎn). In simple terms, it's the intermediary taking a percentage of the blogger's order quote as commission. For example, a blogger's video quote is 10,000 yuan. Based on what I've encountered, the rebate ratio intermediaries require is usually between 30% and 45%. In other words, although the blogger receives an order worth 10,000 yuan, they need to give 3,000 to 4,500 yuan back to the intermediary, ending up with roughly 5,500 to 7,000 yuan themselves. The intermediary's daily work is to collect a large pool of interested bloggers, then decide which ones to collaborate with based on rebates and profit margins. Apart from rebates, you'll also encounter a few common terms when taking commercial orders: - Rebate: the commission ratio the intermediary requires. - On-book (shuǐshàng): refers to reporting through the platform and completing the collaboration. - Off-book (shuǐxià): refers to not reporting through the platform. - Slot (dàngqī): the scheduled publishing time for the content. I think the hardest part of taking commercial orders is the beginning. When you don't have any cooperation cases yet, few brands or intermediaries will come to you proactively, and you yourself don't know where to find orders. But once you complete the first few collaborations and gradually build up some cases, more and more intermediaries will start coming to you with inquiries. Everything is hard at the start, but it gets much easier afterward. The Process of Producing Commercial Orders Once both parties confirm the collaboration, the intermediary will send you a brief. This brief will clearly outline the specific creative requirements, such as which products to introduce, which features to highlight, which hashtags to include, and what content is not allowed. Most of the commercial orders I've received so far are related to AI. For example, large model updates, hands-on tests of Agent products, and some AI industry news content. After receiving the brief, you enter the most time-consuming step in the entire process: content creation. If you have to handle multiple commercial orders at the same time, writing everything from scratch on your own would put enormous time pressure on you, so at this step, I basically use AI tools to assist with creation. I usually throw the brief into Codex first, letting it help me sort out the key points, including the information that must appear, the wording to avoid, and what the brand really wants to convey. After sorting out these requirements, I'll continue brainstorming with it to decide on the topic, content angle, and basic outline. Once the outline is confirmed, the next step is to submit a script. The 'script' here simply means clearly writing out your creative approach. Whether the final output is a video or an illustrated article, as long as you follow this script, you can basically produce the final content. After the script is reviewed by the intermediary and the brand, and confirmed to be fine, it moves into the official execution stage. If it's a video, you start shooting; if it's product experience content, you first actually use the product and document the experience. Finally, you compile these materials into a video or illustrated draft and submit it to the intermediary and brand for final review. Once it passes review, it can be officially published. If it's an on-book collaboration, you need to link the corresponding Pugongying order when publishing. If it's an off-book collaboration, you simply publish directly according to the method agreed by both parties. After the content is published and meets the relevant requirements, after waiting a while, the process enters the final settlement stage. Summary The above is roughly the complete process of a commercial order, from initial contact to settlement. Looking back, the most time-consuming part of the entire process is still content creation. As a creator, the places truly worth spending time on are the topic, the cover, and the content itself. As long as these parts are done well enough, the account has a clear direction and consistent content quality, you won't really lack commercial orders. Of course, I'm still slowly figuring this out myself. I still feel that my own content isn't good enough, and there are many areas where I can continue to improve. But in the future, as soon as I have new insights, run into new pitfalls, or figure out more efficient methods, I'll be sure to share them with everyone right away. OK, I'm Haiming, and I'll share more with you next time.