The Year I Tried to Learn Short Videos and Ended Up Being Ripped Off

The Year I Tried to Learn Short Videos and Ended Up Being Ripped Off These past few days, I’ve seen marketing groups discussing short video courses with great enthusiasm. One senior member pointed out the difficulties with short video courses, and it’s all true~~~

As someone who purchased three short video courses and was ripped off in all three, I feel I have some stories to share with everyone. The total cost of these courses is more than enough to take Xiaomei’s advertising course, and I can only touch my nose in resignation.

These past few days, I’ve seen marketing groups discussing short video courses with great enthusiasm. One senior member pointed out the difficulties with short video courses, and it’s all true~~~ As someone who purchased three short video courses and was ripped off in all three, I feel I have some stories to share with everyone. The total cost of these courses is more than enough to take Xiaomei’s advertising course, and I can only touch my nose in resignation. ​

From last year, I noticed that short videos were starting to rise in popularity. I know a bit about editing but couldn’t grasp the concept of starting an account, so I went on TikTok to find people with relevant experience. I didn’t look for an agency to operate my account because of my engineer’s DIY mentality, and as a small business owner, I’m quite poor. If I can learn it myself, I can save money. QQ​

Some of the courses were live, while others were recorded. I won’t name names (although I paid for them and have the right to speak, I’m afraid of being banned). I found the first instructor on TikTok who seemed like a high achiever, spoke coherently, and had decent traffic on their own account, so I signed up without much hesitation. Indeed, they taught some basic processes for starting an account, such as the importance of the first three seconds of a video, how to establish a persona, and so on. But it was all very basic stuff that I believe anyone who has taken a few relevant courses in the education market can come out and teach. The results were far from my expectations, so I looked for another course.​

I also found the second course on TikTok. This instructor claimed that many accounts came from their courses, and all the courses were live. In addition to repeating the content of the first instructor, they would ask about your industry during the live session and suggest directions for filming your account, but that was it. After finishing the course, they even suggested joining their company’s team if you were interested, which I assume meant selling their company’s products (I don’t know what this business model is called, probably some kind of multi-level marketing). After completing it, I could only smile bitterly. Looking back at the accounts they claimed came from their courses, I can only say they were lucky to catch the early traffic benefits.

After taking two courses, I thought that maybe the TikTok teaching environment wasn’t mature enough, so I decided to take a course on Douyin (Chinese TikTok). After some research, I can only say that every Chinese instructor is very aggressive. When promoting their courses during live streams, each one made it seem like after taking their course, my next viral video would be just around the corner. I watched those Douyin instructors’ live streams for a week or two and selected a course by a photographer from Northeast China. The content was really substantial, including possible monetization methods, several fixed script types for shooting videos (educational, product-selling, process-sharing, etc.), how to film, whether to use a phone or camera, and so on.

After completing this course, I gained a lot, but when I tried to apply it to TikTok, it was completely unsuitable. From my observations, firstly, Douyin and TikTok are at different stages. The strategies for Douyin, where the benefits are about to end, are different from TikTok, which hasn’t taken off yet. For monetization, Douyin allows selling goods through a built-in store, while on TikTok, you have to direct traffic to an external Shopee store, resulting in a significant loss of traffic when switching apps. The algorithms for local promotion on Douyin and TikTok are completely different. These numerous differences make the strategies inapplicable. After failing, I didn’t persist in focusing solely on short videos. I will definitely do it in the future, but after the past year, I’m exhausted. At least until everyone figures out the logic behind short videos, I want to take a temporary break. Q_Q