Review taken from my blog @ AndyWhyte.com

Crush it! By Gary Vay-Ner-Chuk is an informative book about how to use modern technology primarily the internet to exploit a passion you may have for anything and turn it into a credible perhaps hugely successful future career for yourself.

This review is going to be as much about how the book proved its worth prior to me even buying it as it will be about the book itself.

The book is a victim of it’s own preaching as there is absolutely no reason why I should have heard of Gary Vaynerchuk. Further still if I had heard of him there’s no reason why I should buy a book his book. If I were to Google Gary I’d soon find out he was a successful wine merchant who offers critiques on wines from around the world via his video blogs. If I looked further into Gary I’d find out he was a hugely passionate about American Football especially the Jets. Whilst I like wine, and I think I’d like American Football I don’t have a particular interest in either of them. So why did I read his book?

Because quite simply Gary crushed it! – the book talks about how you can harness your passion and monetise it primarily by blogging about it but also all the other things that are imperative along side and beyond the actual content such as social media, becoming involved with communities and building your brand. Just those things are what lead me to buying Crush it! and no more than 1 chapter in I had already pre-ordered his second book ‘The Thankyou Economy’.

So how did it happen?

I was browsing StumbleUpon which is a web 2.0 site where browsers sign up and state what their interests are. StumbleUpon then pulls up pages at random when you hit ‘stumble’ on subjects it thinks you maybe interested in. It pulled up a video of Gary at a Web 2.0 Expo New York in 2008. I really liked what Gary had to say so I became interested in Gary. I started following him on Twitter and liked his Facebook group. I liked how Gary was so interactive despite having hundreds of thousands of followers and literally thousands of people to answer a day. By this point I was a fan. Not a fan of Wine Library TV but a fan of his BRAND which is what the book really hits on.

It was a ridiculously easy decision to buy the book even though I suspected the contents may not teach me a whole lot that I didn’t already know. This issue turned out to be true to a degree but it didn’t matter! the book provides value in two ways. They are as follows:

1) Value to anyone who wants to know what to do to turn their passion into a working reality. - How to setup a blog, how to base your content, how to build your brand, how to monetise.

2) Motivation to make it happen and crush it! - Regardless of whether you already know how to build on your passion ‘Crush it!’ will without a doubt motivate you and give you some real heavy pointers to ensure you really do have everything you need to kill it.

Whether you are a just starting out, already are blogging, or if you’re a business owner or employee who wants to get involved more with blogging this book will give you serious value per page and set you up with the perfect mentality to really go and crush it!

Brilliant!