Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence—and How You Can, Too

by Gary Vaynerchuk

I think it’s often best to chase things that are in line with your passions but aren’t exactly your passion.”

The only way Snapchatters could give their content a longer lifespan and establish a permanent online presence was to screen-shoot the images and push them onto Twitter and Instagram.

Concerned that journalists wouldn’t pay attention to a self-promoter, he decided to use his mom’s e-mail address to pitch stories about Snapchat. Every night, he’d ask his assistant in the Philippines to draft personalized e-mails to contacts at the tech trades—Mashable, BuzzFeed, and Business Insider, for example—with an attachment of his work.

From there, the branding work took off. Besides reprising his role as brand ambassador several times for Disney, Shaun has created Snapchat content for Red Bull, Xfinity Mobile, Taco Bell, and many other companies.

What’s the secret to his success? “Personal relationships. I think a lot of people establish fake, one-way relationships—they just want to ask for something, or they want to do a collab and get a shout-out. They don’t develop those real relationships and provide value and just give, give, give. If you do that, eventually you’ll get back, and that’s where the success comes.”

What I love most about him is how his happiness comes through in everything that he does. He’s a classic storyteller who isn’t afraid to try anything. While many people find every reason in the world to say no, Shaun says yes. That’s his secret sauce.

Twitter is the water cooler of society, that place where everyone goes to get the latest update on whatever news or pop-culture event is occurring.

Other platforms started out as social networks, to be sure, but eventually became content management systems.

But listening well is the key to engaging well on Twitter.

Let me define discipline: it’s backing up your ambitions with your actions.

Cohn. If she just wants a little name recognition from her town’s bar regulars when they talk about their local team, then twenty or forty minutes per day will be perfectly adequate. Maybe.

Twitter gives you a chance to both lure and lasso—or jab and right hook—people into your orbit in a way that no other platform does. It’s a slow, slow, slow process and an immense amount of work, but if you’re willing to do it and your content is special, you should see a payoff.

Where do you think they get the most requests for favors or collabs? Instagram. So even though they probably spend more time on Instagram, you’re more likely to have a better chance of getting a response if you DM them on Twitter, where there is less competition for their attention.

Let’s say you make a YouTube mash-up of the rapper Logic’s music videos. It’s unlikely he’s going to see it, even if he’s tagged. Share the mash-up on Twitter, however, and the retweets can propel your video to dramatic virality, the kind that even the biggest influencers notice. This kind of word of mouth does not exist on Instagram or Snapchat and is enormously beneficial to content creators.

platforms. I post three, maybe four times per day on Instagram, but there are days when I could post forty-seven times on Twitter. The fact that it’s as welcoming to the written word as to pictures gives content creators the flexibility and leeway to increase the volume of their storytelling.

Remember, though, that the best dinner guests are not just great storytellers, but also great listeners. So bring all your smarts, your wit, and your cleverness to the party, keep the conversation going by engaging everyone around you, and watch your influence grow and your opportunities multiply.

Twitter is unmatched in its ability to help you amplify your voice and your brand. If you’re looking for a job or hoping to make your mark in an industry, consider your activity there as the longest interview of your life.

You never have to feel that way on Twitter; the forum gives you endless opportunities to prove why you’re special and deserve to be respected.

Start by looking at the trending topics (in the mobile app, you’ll see them listed when you click on the Search symbol).

Done right, this should take you four to six hours. That’s day one. On day two, you do it again—for four to six hours, or as many as you can spare when you’re not at work or school. Remember, eleven minutes is eleven more than zero, but also remember, twelve minutes gives you more at bats to win than eleven.

Do this repeatedly, consistently, constantly, until your thumbs are callused and your eyes are bleeding, or at least until you feel they should be.

If I made a mistake, I would make fun of myself and keep going, partly because I didn’t know how to edit video. All I knew how to do was put a beginning and an end on it. Sometimes good enough is good enough.

in. I put up my Skype number so that anybody could call at any hour. If I was sitting there, I would take the call. Then I would get the caller’s permission to record the call, because there’s nothing like free content. They were asking me questions, and if they’re asking it, then other people probably have the same one.

I’ve watched Jared carefully for years, and what stands out to me is his inability to complain. Like me, he put out hundreds of hours of content while receiving little traction up front. But that didn’t stop him. That’s the difference between him and almost everyone else, including most of the people who will read this book—he didn’t give up too early. Persistence is everything.

date. It’s certainly the most important platform for building a personal brand, though Instagram is closing the gap quickly.

more eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-olds visit YouTube than any TV network, even on mobile alone.

Vlogging is a terrific way to document instead of create, which means that literally anyone can do it. You don’t need to be accomplished (at least not in the way 99 percent of you reading this define accomplishment) to break out on this platform because, remember, when you’re documenting and not creating, you’re allowed to learn as you go. You don’t have to be an expert (yet). You don’t have to be successful (yet). The only thing you really do have to do is make the road to getting there interesting.

Give yourself a year to adjust and try different approaches and see what kind of response you get. Listen to your audience. Ultimately, it all boils down to this: don’t let perfection be your enemy. Do not be another dreamer who puts up ten episodes, gets trolled or ignored, gets discouraged, and takes the channel down. For God’s sake, give yourself a fair chance to succeed.

Did you become a millionaire? No. But only a tiny percent of the people who try this will. That’s irrelevant. The point is to dream big and then make the practical adjustments necessary once you see where your potential lies. However, you will never, ever know the extent of that potential until you try. I guarantee it’s greater than you think it is.

YouTube Best Practices

YouTube

Decades of testing, experimentation, and life experience led to his and his son’s “overnight success.”

as Dan taught himself to use Final Cut Pro and enhanced the storytelling elements of the videos. For example, when they cut up a football, they opened with footage of themselves throwing a football around. They learned even more by attending video conferences and networking with other YouTubers.

that the way he made money on YouTube was 10 percent from AdSense, 20 percent from licensing content, and 70 percent from sponsored videos.

FameBit, a marketing site where brands post offers to pay creatives to promote their products.

with their channel’s reach—they now had almost one million subscribers—they should be pitching the advertising agencies that run big influencer marketing campaigns.

VidCon, the biggest video conference in the country. Anybody who looked like they were from an advertising agency, I would Google them and find out what company they worked for, and reach out, either by e-mail or their Contact Us page.”

This was their first “big brand” deal, and it was an important moment. “We needed to keep hustling and trying to find brands that we liked and that we wanted to work with that would make sense for our channel. We don’t want to align ourselves with a brand that we don’t support ourselves.”

Dan spent about seven hours editing and published the video a few minutes before leaving for church the next morning. That post became the third most viral video on all of YouTube in 2016, racking up forty-two million views in its first seven days. An entire new audience arrived, many of

He quit his sales job in July 2016.

2 years later

Here’s the reality: if you’re going to build a personal brand and try to monetize it, you have to have a Facebook page. Period. It has almost 2 billion monthly active users, more than half of whom use it daily.1 There are 1.15 billion daily active users on mobile.2 If you’re crushing it on Snapchat, YouTube, or Instagram but don’t have a full-throttle Facebook strategy, you’re severely limiting your potential and growth.

If you haven’t already done so, go to Facebook right now and register your fan page, because even if it’s not the place where you create the pillar content for your personal brand, it is where everything you do on every other platform will come to live for the remainder of your personal brand’s existence.

Facebook’s algorithm will always give preferential treatment to native Facebook content. You’ll get far greater reach by creating an original video for Facebook than by recycling something from another platform. Does the video have great copy alongside it? Are the first three seconds captivating? Does it show an understanding of the mind-set of the Facebook demographic that would love to share it with a family member or friend? Does it compel an action right there and then?

John Lee Dumas, creator of Entrepreneurs on Fire, is a believer, too.

I’m having incredible success using platforms like Wirecast and BeLive.tv, which are just tools that allow me to sit at my computer and do a Facebook Live, but they also have text overlay, pull people’s comments in, and have full-show interaction.

I pour a cup of tea, I sit on Facebook Live, and I usually go on a rant about some topic for five or ten minutes, and then I start answering questions. Just hanging out—could be thirty minutes, could be an hour—and I’ll get hundreds of comments and thousands and thousands of views, all just from flipping on Facebook Live. So to me, that’s where it’s at right now. Facebook Live is where the attention is.

Collaborate. If you are building a brand based on jokes, cooking, bikes, extreme sports, or bathing suits—anything—go to the top of Facebook and do searches on terms that are relevant to your business. Find the fan pages with the most followers, message them, and make them an incredible offer that makes it worth their while to share your original content on their platform or to work with you in other ways.

When you’ve got no audience, you should be taking every opportunity to engage with people who are taking an interest in you. To do otherwise is absolutely bonkers.

While you’re busy posting original content on Facebook, you’re also joining as many Facebook communities as you can. You’ll join the national ones for real estate agents, of course, but you also want to join the Sacramento mom groups—but not to sell, because you know that you should never ask for anything until you’ve given twice as much or more than you’re hoping to get.*

them. If you’re raising a family, you join other family-oriented groups. If you golf, you join the golfing groups. If you like Pokémon Go, you join the Pokémon Go Sacramento group. Get involved in all the lighthearted aspects of the city.

You can also target your search by location. Just type in the name of your city, sometimes even your neighborhood, and click Places or look for the location symbol in your list of top results. You’ll see everyone who posted in your immediate area. Do this—search, click, investigate, DM—for six to seven hours every day. Do it during every lunch break, every bathroom break, every time you’re waiting for your child to get out of dance class, and in the twenty minutes you’ve got before the enchiladas come out of the oven.