On Tuesday afternoon, I went over to Elliott Bay Books to check out Gary Vaynerchuk while he stopped by to talk about his new book, “Crush It.” As usual, his enthusiasm and positive energy was infectious. In fact, the first thing I did when I got home was read the entire book cover to cover and here’s what I learned: if you squeezed Gary until he became an oozing liquid, and then you sopped up his essence with a bunch blank pages, you’d end up with this book (and it would taste nice with a glass of Petit Verdot).
“Crush It” is like having Gary sit down and tell you that it’s time for you live what you love – that there is an unprecedented opportunity to establish your own personal brand and to make a good living at it. The book itself is a practical guide to the current state of content (video, audio and print) on the web, how to see whether you’ve chosen the right niche (do you have 50 posts you can do on it?), and then how to build your influence and audience as you scale out to be a known figure in your chosen space. While some of the tactical information near the end will probably seem very outdated within the next few years, most of the advice in the book is timeless. Gary talks about the importance of having an opinion and telling great stories but focuses even more on how you can build an audience by listening, caring and engaging with people. His life is a living example of each of these precepts and he uses all of the new social media tools at his disposal to find his audience wherever they happen to be.
The following is a recording of Gary’s talk at Elliott Bay Books from October 20th, 2009. It’s worth a listen if you’d like to get a sense of what makes this guy tick and you want some “No BS opinions” on where the internet is heading next. By the way, if you like this, please let me know by leaving some feedback in the comments. I’d be happy to post more author talks whenever I can get to them.
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