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Crushing It!
Gary Vaynerchuk
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eBook - ePub
Crushing It!
Gary Vaynerchuk
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About This Book
Four-time New York Times bestselling author Gary Vaynerchuk offers new lessons and inspiration drawn from the experiences of dozens of influencers and entrepreneurs who rejected the predictable corporate path in favor of pursuing their dreams by building thriving businesses and extraordinary personal brands.
In his 2009 international bestseller Crush It, Gary insisted that a vibrant personal brand was crucial to entrepreneurial success, In Crushing It!, Gary explains why that's even more true today, offering his unique perspective on what has changed and what principles remain timeless. He also shares stories from other entrepreneurs who have grown wealthierâand not just financiallyâthan they ever imagined possible by following Crush It principles. The secret to their success (and Gary's) has everything to do with their understanding of the social media platforms, and their willingness to do whatever it took to make these tools work to their utmost potential. That's what Crushing It! teaches readers to do.
In this lively, practical, and inspiring book, Gary dissects every current major social media platform so that anyone, from a plumber to a professional ice skater, will know exactly how to amplify his or her personal brand on each. He offers both theoretical and tactical advice on how to become the biggest thing on old standbys like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat; podcast platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud, iHeartRadio, and iTunes; and other emerging platforms such as Musical.ly. For those with more experience, Crushing It! illuminates some little-known nuances and provides innovative tips and clever tweaks proven to enhance more common tried-and-true strategies.
Crushing It! is a state-of-the-art guide to building your own path to professional and financial success, but it's not about getting rich. It's a blueprint to living life on your own terms.
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1
The Path Is All Yours
An entrepreneur is someone who finds a way.
âShaun âShondurasâ McBride
The promise of my first business book, Crush It!, was to teach entrepreneurs how to monetize their passion by using social media to build a strong personal brand to attract customers and advertisers to their websites, as well as transform them into such trusted experts or entertainment figures that brands and outlets would pay them to talk, consult, and attend events. In other words, it was all about building a personal brand around your business strong enough to make you an influencer. And yet the word influencer doesnât appear once. The multibillion-dollar influencer marketing industry was still so new at the time, the concept hadnât crystallized when that book was published in 2009. Yet today, influencer marketing is poised to eat a real chunk of traditional marketingâs lunch. Younger consumers spend increasingly less time on traditional media and more time consuming content online.
- YouTubeâs daily viewership is closing in on TVâs 1.25 billion hours per day, as television viewership falls every year.1
- One in every five minutes spent on mobile is spent on Facebookâs apps and services.2
- Every minute, 65,900 videos and photos are posted on Instagram.3
- Over 3 billion snaps are created each day on Snapchat, where over 60 percent of ads are watched with the audio on.4
Consequently, since 2009, brands have tripled the amount of money they spend on social media.5 With the explosion in the number of social networks available to anyone who wants to amass an audience, and vast sums of money being redirected toward those networks, influencer marketing has become a legitimate monetization strategy for anyone building an online profile, which means pretty much anyone in business.
How legitimate? The top-grossing YouTubers earned a combined $70 million in 2016. Many fit a certain typeâseveral are gamer dudes, for exampleâbut Lilly Singh is a rapper-comedian who features Punjabi culture in her videos, Rosanna Pansino is a baker, and Tyler Oakley is an LGBTQ activist.6 In the past, the top-grossing list has also included dancing violinist Lindsey Stirling and makeup artist Michelle Phan.7 The most popular Instagrammers can earn seven figures per year from their social-media efforts alone. Even with only a thousand followers, an entry-level Instagrammer could earn about $5,000 per year with just two posts a week, and ten thousand followers could net almost $20,000 per year.8 Again, thatâs with just two posts per week; imagine the earnings if that Instagrammer posted more frequently. Letâs think about that. The median salary for US employees is about $51,000.9 You can earn that as an office manager, or you can earn the same amount running your own business built around something you love more than anything else in the world. Want to play it safe? You can work as an office manager, go home, and then earn an extra $10,000 a year on Twitch letting people watch you play and comment on your favorite video game, because you really are that good at it. Or use YouTube to share insanely cool science experiments. Or post pictures on Instagram of your pet hedgehogs wearing tiny hats. Thanks to the proliferation of platforms and the migration of TV and magazine viewers to the Internet, there is room for many, many more experts and personalities to create a lucrative, sustainable ecosystem that promotes and grows their businesses or even side hustles.
Itâs a great time to be a fashion model, for example. There was a time when there was room for only a handful of superstars to see themselves featured in editorial fashion spreads and on the runways. Then there were maybe a thousand in the middle getting steady commercial work in print and TV. The rest found themselves at the bottom, scraping by doing catalog and promotional work. But the Internet has opened a floodgate of opportunity for anyone willing to hustle to grow a fan base through blogs and video channels to attract the attention of the hundreds of thousands of brands eager to spend money supporting popular, good-looking, fashionable people by branded content and advertising. Not only that, people blessed with model good looksâor even just blessed with angle and filter savvyâdonât actually have to model to get paid. The huge shift in attention to social media means that beautiful people are no longer beholden to the magazines or talent agencies or anyone, really, to make money off their looks. They can look fabulous every day on their own platforms while engaging with a steadily growing audience, and brands will come begging for exposure. Just ask Brittany Xavier (see Chapter 13).
We often define an influencer as someone who garners such a big audience on social media that brands offer to pay that person to attend events, take selfies with products, or talk about services. Brands have paid the famous people of the Internet billions of dollars to be their endorsers, sponsors, promoters, and product placers. Product placement is a natural fit with the YouTube and Instagram crowd, but it can leave the motorcycle-king bloggers or raspberry-jam-queen podcastersâthose who might not feel photogenic or charismatic enough for constant selfies or videoâfeeling as if their options for growing their influence and building revenue streams are limited to selling ad space. Iâm here to tell you, they are not. You just have to be smart and strategic about how you use your content. Look, Iâve been paid to write books and speak on national and international stages, and Iâve earned enough to make the kind of investments that could pay out for generations. However, I have not made one penny because an energy drink company paid me to say, âThis is my secret to working eighteen hours a day.â
Iâm an entrepreneur who built a $150 million media company in part because of my personal brand, which I developed by first creating valuable content that grew my influence. Thatâs one way to crush it. By all means, though, go ahead and make money over time by running ads, for example by selling ad space to a candy bar company. As your star rises, you could get paid $10,000 for placing a candy bar on your table while you work. But for Godâs sake, donât stop there. Thatâs where you start. Donât leave money on the table because you donât realize how much bigger you can get. How big? The Internet is an entrepreneurâs oyster, and you can use its pearly platforms to build a personal brand so powerful that the world is not only willing to pay you for your products or services or to promote other peopleâs products and services, but also it might even be willing to pay you to just be you. To me, that is when youâve become a true influencer. At its height, influencer marketing is reality TV 2.0. I want you to think of yourself as tomorrowâs newest star.
You the entrepreneur are no different from the organic mac-and-cheese brand that branches out into cheddar cheese crackers and chicken noodle soup. The brand was never about organic mac and cheese; it was about organic comfort food. Youâre the expectant mom who starts a pregnancy podcast and then writes a book on raising kids suffering from anxiety. Youâre the home cook with a beautiful Instagram stream who starts a podcast on canning and gets invited to write a column about urban gardening in a national magazine. Youâre the boy who started a wine blog that wasnât actually about wine but about making a name for himself as the person who could show other businesses better ways to communicate and sell. The home cookâs Instagram isnât about food but about building her influence in the healthy-lifestyle category. The momâs podcast on pregnancy is just the patty of a parenthood burger.
Your personal brand can get you all the fixings you want. Its outsize importance in todayâs business world means stardom is no longer limited to the most beautiful or telegenic among us; the field is open to many, many more players. It also means that most entrepreneurs still have lots of room to ratchet up their game to become influencers. Iâm watching you out there, and itâs shocking to me how many entrepreneurs trap themselves into boxes of their own making, even though they have so much more power than they did before.
Letâs say youâre killing it on Twitter. What are you going to do the day you realize youâre tired of Twitter? What are you going to do if Twitter disappears? What if youâre the countryâs favorite beekeeper and you develop a deadly allergy to bees? Itâs a matter of survival to think beyond your current successes and constantly look for ways to create new ones so that youâre never limited to any one platform or even one topic. How do you do that? By creating a personal brand so powerful that it transcends platforms, products, and even your passion.
Take cultural icon Julie Andrews,* the rosy-cheeked star of multiple Broadway and Hollywood masterpieces like Camelot, The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins. Her entire careerâher entire identityâwas built on the soaring soprano voice that made her a household name. âI thought . . . my voice was what I am.â10 Then about twenty years ago, she had surgery to remove precancerous cysts on her vocal cords. When she awoke, the cysts were gone, but so was her voice. But because she was Julie Andrews, that wasnât the end of her career. She has since written dozens of childrenâs books, starred in the blockbuster movie series The Princess Diaries, and most recently, in conjunction with Jim Henson Company, produced and starred in a Netflix series that teaches arts appreciation to preschoolers.
Oprah was not just a talk show host. Muhammad Ali was not just a boxer. The Rock is not just a wrestler. A strong personal brand is your ticket to complete personal and professional freedom. I want you to become the Julie Andrews or Muhammad Ali of your industry. Of course, for this to work, you have to start with phenomenal talent. Unlike these celebrities, though, you wonât need an agent to get you noticed by the right people and start making better money. In 2009, a comedian who amassed thousands of followers cracking jokes on Twitter started making real money only when she got signed by Creative Artists Agency and landed a âreal jobâ writing jokes for David Letterman. Today, however, you donât need to write jokes for other people when the maker of M&Mâs, Mars, could pay you $10,000 to tweet your own M&M joke. And you donât need to sell your material to a television network to land a lucrative deal. Letâs remember that back in 2009, people still used their phones as phones. We were still using flip cams to film our videos, and our phones hadnât metamorphosed into our televisions and movie screens. Thatâs all changed. The Internet became the ultimate middleman, allowing every industry to go direct-to-consumer, from music and publishing to taxis and hotels. Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook are the NBC, ABC, and CBS of our day. Your audience is waiting for you. What you need to do is figure out how youâre going to become the next Empire.
In 2009, I was trying to get you to understand that you could make some money in the online world or use it to catapult yourself to the mainstream if that was your end goal. Today, the Internet is the mainstream. You are in complete control of how the world sees you, how often, and in what context. Social-media phenom John âThe Fat Jewishâ Ostrovsky had been on the entertainment circuit for years, signing with a record label in college and hosting a celebrity interview show on E!, but it wasnât until he amassed half a million followers on Instagram that he was able to parlay his comedy and performance art into a book deal, a wine label, and appearances on reality TV (which led to his gaining ten million followers on Instagram). Superstar fil...