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

by Gary Vaynerchuk

To see these instructions in action, go to the following post: GaryVee.com/GVBizDev.

you know that the fastest way for a brand starting at zero, like yours, is to master hashtags.

Xavier wasn’t a seasoned influencer yet, but she was smart enough to know that a company’s first offer was almost always less than what it was ultimately willing to pay.

At her husband’s suggestion, she also started getting more personal on her blog, starting with a post titled “I Quit.” The response was so overwhelming, in particular from other people wanting advice on how to start their own blogs, that she started posting weekly blogging tips. The first, “How I Started My Blog in 5 Steps,” remains one of her most read posts.

For this reason, she has developed good relationships with a number of hotel brands, and now when she and her family travel on their own, their stays are usually comped. She is also frequently invited to visit openings of new resorts or hotels so she can share the experience with her readers.

Sometimes brands request pictures of Brittany with Jadyn, especially for child-friendly or Mother’s Day events or promotions. When that happens, Xavier’s rate goes up, and she deposits a portion of the fee into an account created for Jadyn, which she’s using to teach her ten-year-old the basic principles of financial literacy.

Brands are always looking for what’s new. They’re also pouring more money into [influencer marketing], because they’re seeing more of the conversion of blogs versus a radio ad or a television ad, where they have no tracking. But through blogs, they’re able to track exactly where the links are coming from and exactly the conversions. “Brands are definitely

research. You don’t just sign up. For the first year, I wasn’t making any money, maybe $100 or $200 a month. It was nothing. People don’t understand that part. They’re like, “Why would you do it for a year when you see no return?” I was seeing a return on my readership, and my following was growing, and that was motivating me. But for someone starting a blog who wants to make it specifically for money, it’s a hard way to start, because you’re not passionate about what you’re doing. You have to love what you do.

In addition, as of 2014, the 139 million total commuters in the United States spent 29.6 billion hours traveling to and from their workplaces.1 A lot of that commute time is spent in cars where drivers can’t watch videos (for now). They can, however, easily listen to podcasts. In the information age, podcasts allow us to efficiently and effectively maximize our knowledge.

three short years, yours is one of the Top 150 podcasts on Apple. The podcast is your pillar, but you use it to create microcontent, too. Judy’s sense of humor is often good for a quote, so you create memes and post them on Facebook and Instagram. You engage with people on Twitter and raise awareness of the podcast there. The two of you are interviewed by Entertainment Weekly and Variety. In time, it gets harder for you to get out of the house every week—your back often aches, and you’re most comfortable in your La-Z-Boy—but it doesn’t matter anymore because the studios are sending you and Judy their movies to preview.

The two biggest areas I had to develop to go along with discipline were productivity and focus.

What I found very clearly was, if you are willing to commit to delivering free, valuable, and consistent content, you are going to build an audience from that. Then, if you are willing to engage that audience one-on-one and ask them, “What are you struggling with?” and then just listen, they will tell you what their pain points are, their obstacles, their challenges, their struggles. And then you, the person that they know, like, and trust, who’s been delivering that free, valuable, and consistent content for a significant amount of time, can provide the solution in the form of a product, or a service, or a community.

I day-trade attention, and lately I am particularly interested by what people pay attention to during the transitions of their day, especially the three that occur in the home: what they do during the first fifteen minutes of their morning, the first fifteen minutes after they come home from work, and the last fifteen minutes before they go to sleep at night. Those are transition periods. They’re the moments when we take stock, get updated, and plan for the next few hours of our lives.

Podcasts fill our brains during the long periods when we’re quiet, such as while we drive or travel. Voice-first platforms are going to allow us to fill our brains during all the interstices of our lives, those blips of time that used to be lost to forgettable activities like brushing our teeth, sorting through mail, or even checking our phone notifications. In 2016, Google revealed that 20 percent of searches on its mobile app and Android devices are done by voice.

two. I started with Alexa, launching a Flash Briefing Skill called GaryVee365. A Flash Briefing is a short report offering users a key bit of information. Mine offers daily motivation from yours truly. The Skimm’s airs its breakdown of the day’s top news stories; eHow’s presents daily life hacks. Add these and others to your list of Flash Briefings, and when you ask for them, either by saying, “Alexa, give me my Flash Briefings,” or even, “Alexa, what’s in the news?” you’ll hear from your favorite sources one after another.

I could develop a Skill called GaryVee Recommends Wine that recommends three wines to go with whatever you told it you were going to eat and gives you the ability to order those wines straight from the Skill through a third-party alcohol delivery service like Drizly or Minibar Delivery or from my family wine shop, Wine Library.

Just like the first washing machines and coffeemakers, Voice-First platforms will save people time. Once the masses understand that, they are going to flock to them. Be there ready and waiting when they do. Your Flash Briefing will be a one-minute version of your one-hour podcast, a one-minute audio version of your eight-minute videos or live streams, or a one-minute selection of your pretty pictures on Instagram.

While brands have developed countless Skills, most deliver the same basic experience. The field is clear for anyone who is clever enough to come up with something fresh and new.

Very soon, as even more brands jump onto these platforms, it will get harder to make a dent in people’s awareness. Don’t let this moment pass. Don’t let the big guys snap up all the cheap real estate. Please, put down this book right now and go create your Skill. Your one-minute audio tip of the day could be the thing that compels a person to p...

Make it the highest quality possible. I cannot stress how important it is that you not treat your Skill as a dumping ground.

There is no Skills 201. The feature is so new, we’re only just now identifying best practices.

Right now we’re putting Voice-First tech in only one or two rooms in the house. In the future, we won’t go anywhere without it.

And this, this, is why you want to create content for Alexa now. What Facebook did for social-network games and Apple did for apps, Amazon is going to do for Skills and Flash Briefings.

Five years from now, everyone will have a Flash Briefing, and it’s highly unlikely that yours will get noticed without marketing the living shit out of it to get exposure. Five years from now, the moment will be gone. Do. Not. Wait.

While I was working on this book, Amazon announced that it had bought Whole Foods for just over $13.4 billion. We all woke up to the news and thought, How the fuck did that happen? It never should have. Whole Foods should have bought Amazon. There was a time twenty years ago when Whole Foods was a much bigger business than Amazon, and when your company is that much bigger than someone else’s, with that much of a lead, yours should never lose. If it does, it’s because your opposite number innovated ahead of you.

Learn the lesson now: everyone is playing the same game. If you don’t play offense all the time, every day, every year, no matter how successful you become, someday you will wind up playing defense.

I’ve got my eye on Marco Polo, Anchor, After School, AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality), and AI (artificial intelligence).

The passion I have deployed around Alexa Flash Skills is the same passion I had for Twitter and YouTube in 2008 when I wrote this book’s mother, Crush It!, back when the masses didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.

You shouldn’t have to turn to me to ask what’s next. What do you see?

When I shifted that focus and started caring about the customer in front of me, things started happening. I’m not super passionate about bodybuilding, I’m not a workout freak. I work out and stay in good shape, but it’s just part of what I do so I can do other things. I’m passionate about creating people’s success stories.

“Advertising should be used to accelerate the stories that are being told about you. People were finding us, coming into our company, staying, and referring their friends. If people aren’t telling good stories, all advertising is going to do is