Matt W. Kane

Why now is the time to crush it!

Why now is the time to crush it! Cash in on your passion. by Gary Vaynerchuk

Chapter 1: passion is everything.

  • Perez Hilton, Zero Frank, and Veronica Belmont,  Heathers Cocks  (gofugyourself.typepad.com) totally crushed it, and you can, too.
  • You can use the internet to build a platform where you can talk about worms to your hearts content. Passion is contagious. If you channel it into creating amazing content and distribute that content using the social media tools I discuss in this book, someone like me who rocks at business development will eventually find it and become a fan. The day I hear you say that you can use a particular kind of warm to catch 80% more bass and then you might otherwise, I’m going to see the business opportunity and contact you. Together we create an online show or written blog for audio podcast around your passion to reach the fishing marketplace, a billion dollar industry. We launch the content, and people are immediately drawn to you, we build a community by capitalizing on all the social media tools and techniques at our disposal, we work as many hours as possible, and next thing we know we have the biggest fishing lure company in the country asking us to advertise on our site. From there we start building word of mouth and opening up more revenue streams, and there you have it. Your passion for worms in tandem with my passion for business development will inevitably result in the business that crushes it.
  • If you want me to explain this global, over-the-top statement in more details and I have room for in this book? Email me at gary@vaynermedia.com.

Chapter 2: success is in your DNA.

  • I knew from my experience with a baseball card business that people want to be told what good and bible, and they enjoy feeling like they have been turned on to something not everyone can appreciate it.
  • Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business.
  • I had my aha moment, I wasn’t going to use video blogs to sell wine send me: I was going to use video blogs to build a whole new world for wine, and for myself. I waited to get to the store through the holiday season, and then launched winelibrarytv in February three months later.

Chapter 3 build your personal brand.

  • You just read the piece of my story that most people don’t know, that is probably the most important part. I’ll say it again: Wine Library TV was never about selling wine on the Internet. It was always about building brand equity.
  • So that no one accused my show of being an extended sales pitch, I make sure that one library only carry 15 or fewer cases of whatever I talked about. If I give something a good review and it sells out everyone has to go everywhere else to get it.
  • Whether you’re delivering your content by video, podcast or blog, it’s the authentic you, the one thing that is guaranteed to differentiate you from everybody else, including those who share your niche or business model. The thing that most people don’t realize is that in today’s world your business and your personal brand need to be one and the same, whether you’re selling organic fish food or financial advice or just your opinion.
  • Are usually advise people to ignore the quantity of people following them and focus instead on the quality of their interactions with those followers – it’s a lot more indicator of how well your brand is doing. Many decision makers, however still orange aware of this important detail, and therefore the preceding celebrities will benefit from those nice numbers were seen. We eyeballs go, opportunity follows.
  • Are the people whom you might have never heard of are putting out great content and leveraging social media and killing it, like Dave Morin, Chris Sacca, Justine Ezarik, and Kevin Rose. Their personal brands are skyrocketing, and there’s no reason to think that eventually they won’t become household names.
  • So I became the wine guy, and that’s how I built my personal brand, not with wine per se. I offer my personal brand, not wine.
  • A cultivated another brand too, of course, the one that got me this book deal and the keynote speeches and consulting gigs, as well as help me and my brother building Vayner media.
  • Opportunity lies and transparency.
  • Let’s say you are in real estate and you love it. Part of the real estate game is learning to put some serious spin on a loser property right? You pitch it as a charming fixer upper or a gem just waiting for some TLC. Even the appealing properties get the rose color treatment. What if you sat down in front of a camera and post a series of video blogs telling people what you really thought of the homes are commercial sites or lot you’re selling? What if you said something like: I have got one ugly house to sell. Seriously folks, you’ve got to see this one if only to take in one of the last surviving examples of red shag carpeting matched with faux deer antlers, woodland creature chandeliers. The sellers are super nice and I would love to get them the $360,000 they originally wanted, but I’ve talked to them about it and they understand that they need to set their sights lower because this sucker need some serious renovations. I’m thinking you should take a look at it if you’ve got about 275 K to spend, plus some extra bucks for a contractor. And bring your imaginations. Lot of it. Now, I know there are laws in real estate that might make it hard to execute this idea. Clearly, I was pushing the limits. But that type of transparency can get you noticed.
  • One real estate agent who is building a powerful online personal brand is Ian Wat. Every video black he launches as he drives around the streets of Vancouver, where he’s based, dispenses and thoughts on the real estate business and the state of the market or offers general advice to property buyers and sellers. He’s lively, he’s knowledgeable and he’s crushing it big time.
  • Now though, the internet and social networks, and the instant access to online communities and the millions of people who will eventually join them they provide – – have pumped word of mouth up like it was on steroids. The customer no longer is limited to talking about their experience with your personal brand to the people in their immediate circle or even in random encounters during the day. Now if they have a Twitter account, they can tell 5000 people she just read your hilarious blog post.
  • Developing a personal brand is the same thing as living and breathing your resume every second that you’re working. Your latest tweet and I comment on Facebook and most recent blog post? That’s her resume now. That’s how you’re going to announce to the world your ideas and opinions, the very things that make you unique and reveal Wi-Fi – – or better yet, a passionate entrepreneur cherry picking top talent to build a whole new kind of investment company – – would be dumb not to hire you. Think about how different your situation would look if you got laid off but you had been keeping up your personal brand and become well established as a hot commodity. Before, it would have taken hours of phone calls and emails to announce you were available. Today, 30 minutes after getting the bad news and write a blog post, then send out a tweet and a status update on Facebook about your situation, and immediately every manager in the industry would know you’re looking for a job and since they already are familiar with your brand, they think how can I get them on board.

Chapter for a whole new world.

  • Recently Tara Seifert announced she was quitting her day job to devote herself entirely to blonde chick boutique.com where she’s building a passionate community of fiber growers and artisans, she sells hand-dyed Organic yarn and blogs about knitting, dying and other domestic arts. She’s clearly crushing it. Why can’t you

Chapter 5 create great content

  • To monetize your personal brand into a business using social marketing networks, two pillars need to be in place: product and content.
  • Great content is what you’re going to pump into your social media networks to draw eyeballs to your blog. It exists as a result of Passion Plus expertise, so make sure you can talk about your product like no one else can
  • There’s only one test that can suggest if you want to absolutely be sure that the passion around which you are building a brand is also a monetizable product. Can you think of at least 50 blog topics that your amp to write about? That’s about the minimum number of posts you need to give yourself enough time to get a feel for the situation.
  • Great content is also about telling stories, and that’s even true if you are in retail or business to business or consumer services. If you’re a real estate agent and your area is Clark New Jersey, then you should want to tell me everything about Clark that makes it unique.
  • You can monetize any passion, but the level at which you can monetize will be affected by the size of your niche and whether you are able to differentiate yourself enough from the other players in it. There are a lot of pockets out there today, however, that can sustain a nice 40 to $75,000 a year business.
  • Know yourself. Choose the right medium, choose the right topic, create awesome content, and you can make a lot of money being happy.
  • You’re going to work your content in two ways. The first is as a lawyer, creating it, posting it and allow people to come to you as they discovered. The second is to use it as a lasso through comments on other people’s content that relates to yours, inserting yourself into existing conversations and actively creating reasons for your audience to come to you. Of course, you have to give people a place to find your killer content.

Chapter 6 choose your platform.

  • A perfectly placed billboard on the New Jersey Turnpike, direct mail and radio. The billboard brought in 170 orders. The radio campaign did about 240. Through direct mail we got a little over 300. I twittered out for free, a free shipping code and got 700 orders in 48 hours. What this antidote should prove to you is that platforms are everything, and that the old ones are softening.
  • It’s a little known fact, that Tumblr is the only blogging platform that will host your domain name for free, which can save you hundreds of dollars a year.
  • Email me at gary@vaynermedia.com for details about the press conference I’m going to have to explain why I’m a fan of tumblr .
  • It’s a press release opportunity, allowing companies and businesses to have a closer relationship with their customer. It closes the six degrees of separation – 1 degrees of separation. ( Twitter)
  • There’s massive opportunity for every entrepreneur and business to keep constant tabs on what their customers are thinking about them.
  • If you’re not using Twitter because you are in the camp that believes it stupid, you’re going to lose out. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s stupid, it’s free communication. That in and of itself has value that you should take advantage of.
  • For a very low cost of entry and time Twitter allows consumer to tell every person in the world what he thinks is cool or crappy or interesting.
  • The best business street of all time: what can I do for you? – – you’ll be amazed at the response you get. You’re in business to serve your community. Don’t ever forget that.
  • If you do a search on Twitter, you can find at least 15 people in the last 20 minutes that have said they’re thirsty. This is a golden opportunity for someone in the sports drink business for the bottled water business. Your line If you do a search on twitter, you can find at least 15 people in the last 20 minutes I have said they’re thirsty. This is a golden opportunity for someone in the sports string business the bottled water business.
  • Vidder is a smaller YouTube, which allows you to see and be seen with greater ease.
  • There is no way to overestimate the importance of Ustream.tv, one of the biggest brand building products I’ve ever used. It’s a platform that allows you to launch live video, but the cool part is that it also has a chat function that allows you to interact with your audience in real time, much like a radio call in show.
  • If you are a video blogger, you must have a tubemogul account. It’s a website that allows you to upload your video once, then distributed to countless video sharing sites for free. It’s also a tracking service, offering analytics about who is watching your videos, when and from what sites.

Chapter 7 keep it real, very real.

  • No matter how big or small you want to go, your authenticity will be at the root of your appeal and is what will keep people coming to your site and spreading the word about your personal brand, service or whatever you are offering.
  • If you contact me within a year of starting your business to complain that you haven’t made the money that you thought you would, you’re not listening. It can’t happen overnight.

Chapter 8 create community: digging your internet trench

  • Creating community, that’s where the bulk of your Hustle is going to go and where the bulk of your success will be determined. Creating community is about starting conversations.
  • To create an audience for your personal brand, you’re going to get out there, shake hands enjoying every single online conversation already and play around the world about your topic. Every. Single. One.
  • At this point you are initiating contact with anyone who might have an interest in your passion, later you will spend these late night hours responding to the people who have responded to you. Building and sustaining a community is never ending part of doing business.
  • Here’s how you will read hundreds of blog posts and leave comments on many of them. First, create your blog post and distributed through tube Mongol so that your content and Piers on every social networking platform available. Next, start paying attention to other people’s content. You’re going to use the tools we discussed in the last chapter, Lake Twitter to research, to see that every mention of your topic on the internet, and you’re going to comment on every single blog and forum post and tweet that you can find. Now, you’re going to say something just for the sake of saying something. You are an expert right, you love your topic and you’ve been doing your research. So you leave expert, intriguing, thoughtful, provocative, intelligent comments with their name and the link back to your blog. Lastly you’re going to capture. If you’re as good as you should be when you’re talking about your passion, people are going to be intrigued by what you have to say. Even if they don’t follow you immediately, if they see you appear on their site often enough, they may get serious enough to follow you back to your blog.
  • How do you know when you’ve built a community? When one person is listening. Winelibrarytv had 5 years at first
  • Don’t get obsessed with how many friends are fans are following you, the stats are only marginally important. What’s important is the intensity of your community’s engagement and interaction with you. At this point the quality of the conversation is much more revealing than the number of people having it. If your content is making people talk enough so that they start to make some noise, I guarantee you’re going to see more people show up to your party. As long as you’re seeing your audience grow, even modestly over the first four to five months, you’re doing what you’re supposed to do.
  • The day you see that one person is reading or watching or listening to you is the day to celebrate.

Chapter 9: the best marketing strategy ever…CARE.
Chapter 10 make the world listen

Chapter 11 start monetizing.

  • A good resource for affiliate marketing program is Commission Junction.
  • One of my favorite websites is loaded with affiliates but manages to do so in a trustee and classy way check out www.encrate.com.

Chapter 12 roll with it
Chapter 13 legacy is greater than currency