As hard as you’re going to push yourself, don’t plan on seeing results right away.
I’d say that this leads us to the number one issue that trips up a lot of otherwise savvy entrepreneurs trying to build their brand online.
patience
Ninety percent of the people I hear from are in complaint mode, usually to the tune of, “I’m working hard and I’m crushing it and nothing’s happening. What gives?” So I ask, how long have you been at this? And they’ll usually answer something like, “Six weeks.” Six weeks? You don’t build businesses in six weeks, or two months, or six months. If you contact me within a year of starting your business to complain that you haven’t made the money you thought you would, you’re not listening. I said that you could make a ton of money being happy; I didn’t say you could do it overnight.
People listen to me talk about what it takes to monetize their personal brand and sometimes I think they filter out the parts they don’t want to hear. They think, I’ve got the passion, I can do hustle like nobody else. Patience? Leave that for the other guys—I’m gonna turbocharge this sucker. But patience is the secret sauce. Once you put up your site, you don’t want to start and stop, backtrack and second-guess. It’ll make you look insecure and foolish. If you’re patient, you’ll be more likely to plan and prepare and make sure everything is in place before making the big moves that are going to monetize your brand to the fullest.
Everyone makes a big deal over the fact that it only took me eighteen months from the time I launched Winelibrarytv.com to getting booked on the Conan O’Brien show. I started taping episodes in 2006, back before most people were watching online videos. I’m sure if I started the blog today, now that more people have iPhones and are watching online videos, it would take me even less time to get on everyone’s radar. Yet as fast as the results seem to have happened, I can assure you that the whole process took a hell of a long time.
You’ll recall that I was only sixteen when I started working the floor at Shopper’s Discount Liquors selling wine to customers, which meant that I still couldn’t drink the stuff. I knew, though, that appreciating wine, and therefore being able to sell it and discuss it confidently, meant developing a great palate. I read all the tasting notes in Wine Spectator and started to learn to identify flavor profiles of things that I could easily find at ShopRite, like pear, papaya, cherries, chocolate, and blackberries. I didn’t stop there, though. I sought out more exotic fare, like cassis and black raspberry preserve and star fruit (recently I discovered goji berries…good stuff). But there was more. Critics noted hints of cigar, and dirt, and even sweaty sock in wine. I knew they were guessing—there was no way they’d sucked on a sweaty sock—and I thought, Well, if I’m going to say something tastes like sweaty socks, shouldn’t I know what it tastes like? So I gave myself an education. By the time I was twenty-one, I had an incredibly developed palate, even though I hadn’t drunk much wine at all.
When I started developing the idea for building Wine Library TV, and later Garyvaynerchuk.com, I knew that I would have to use the same kind of patience and methodology to learn the social media business as I did to learn the wine business.
It was patience that helped me grow Wine Library, too. I was twenty-two years old and running a ten-million-dollar business. I did it with good old-fashioned hustle—every customer who walked in got monetized to the fullest. If they walked in for one bottle, they usually walked out with three. And I was being paid $27,000 a year. Most young people who take a business from four to ten million feel they deserve a watch and a car and a cool apartment as rewards for their savviness and hard work. Get over that. You come last. Before you invest in yourself, you have to invest in your long-term future. That means your profits should funnel right back into your research, your content, and your staff should you have any. The sooner you start cashing in, the shorter window you have in which to cement your success. So hold off as long as you can.
This is why, as ambitious and thirsty as I was for megasuccess as a business developer, I didn’t make a peep anywhere the first year and a half that I was airing the show. I didn’t try to make one biz dev deal. I probably could have had some success had I jumped the gun, but by remaining patient and making sure I knew exactly what I was doing, I was able to avoid taking any steps backward once the speaking engagements, consulting opportunities, and advertisers started showing up.
How did someone like me, who is so obviously not a patient guy, cool my heels for so long? Because I was 100 percent happy. I loved what I was doing. I knew down to my core that my business was going to explode, but even if I had fallen flat on my face, I would have had no regrets because I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it.
Now do you get why it’s so, so important for you to center your business on your passion? If you enter a niche because you’re following the dollars, you won’t keep it up. It’s too much work, and you will get tired and frustrated and you will eventually fold. You have to think about building your brand in terms of a marathon, not a sprint. It will take longer to see results, but in seven or nine or fifteen years you won’t crack, you’ll still love what you’re doing.
What exactly are you going to be doing that’s going to be so time and labor intensive? You’ll be studying your topic, researching your platforms, drafting your blog posts, doing whatever it takes to become the foremost expert and personal brand in your field. But most of all, you will be creating a community.
eight
create community: digging your internet trench
A lot of people get wrapped up in designing their blogs and writing or taping their content. But creating your content is the easy part. Of course your product should be as good as it can be, but it should also be the least time-consuming element of your whole endeavor. What you do after you tape a show or write or record is the whole game. Creating community—that’s where the bulk of your hustle is going to go and where the bulk of your success will be determined.
Creating community is about starting conversations. When you move into a new house, you meet your neighbors by going out in the evenings and shaking hands with people walking their dogs or taking their runs, complimenting people on their gardens, introducing your kids if you notice a family playing in their yard with children of the same age. If you go to a conference, you meet your fellow attendees by introducing yourself and shaking hands with everyone else who’s milling about. You trade anecdotes and information, hand out your business card. Creating community online works exactly the same way. To create an audience for your personal brand, you’re going to get out there, shake hands, and join every single online conversation already in play around the world about your topic. Every. Single. One.
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Jared Montz is a retired professional soccer player who relies heavily on just about every platform we’ve discussed in this book to build his brand and America’s 1st Online Soccer Academy, JMSoccer10.com. Though he barely understood Facebook and didn’t have a Twitter account when he started, he now considers them his biggest asset, using them to build a community of soccer fans and friends, draw traffic to his site, and alert followers whenever he posts a new blog, video, or podcast (that’s right, he uses all three). “I go to bed at 3:00 A.M., wake up at 6:00 A.M., and spend hours commenting and talking with people about soccer. Not selling them my stuff, but talking about soccer. They will find out what I do on their own without me spamming them.” His equipment? A laptop, his fiancée’s six-year-old camera, a POS tripod, and his iPhone. Is he crushing it? In his own words, “I’m having a blast! It’s fun to meet people and players no matter what, but businesswise the potential is just scary. It takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but if you love it then it’s all worth it.”
* * *
Every subject, no matter how small, has an Internet trench. You need to find it (googling is a way to start). Every night after taping an episode of my show, I’d spend the next eight or nine hours in the Internet wine tren
ches, digging up as much information as possible about who was talking about wine and wine-related subjects and products—what they were saying, where they were going, who they were reading, what they were drinking, what they were buying, what they were slamming. And then I’d start reaching out.
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At a certain point, your business will start gaining eyeballs and your community focus will change. Whereas at this point you’re initiating contact with anyone who might have an interest in your passion, later you will spend these late-night hours responding to the people who have responded to you. Building and sustaining community is a never-ending part of doing business.
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I would read hundreds of blog posts and leave comments on many of them. I’d spend time on wine forums and read what other people said and then comment on those comments.
You’re going to do exactly the same thing. Here’s how:
First, create your blog post and distribute it through TubeMogul (video) or Ping.fm (links) so that your content appears on every social networking platform available.
Next, start paying attention to other people’s content. You’re going to use the tools we discussed in the last chapter, like Twitter Search, to seek out every mention of your topic on the Internet, and you’re going to comment on every single blog and forum post and tweet that you can find. Now, you’re not going to say something just for the sake of saying something. You’re an expert, right? You love your topic and you’ve been doing your research. So you leave expert, intriguing, thoughtful, provocative, intelligent comments with your name and a link back to your blog.
Last, you’re going to capture. If you’re as good as you should be when you’re talking about your passion, people are going to be intrigued by what you have to say. Even if they don’t follow you immediately, if they see you appear on their site often enough, they may get curious enough to follow you back to your blog. That’s when you’ve got them.
* * *
You know how to solidify your fan base? Pay attention to them. I’ve picked up the phone to talk to people when it seemed warranted or appropriate. The chalkboard behind me during many wine blog episodes is for my hard-core fans—whatever appears there is a coded message or inside joke just for them. Little gestures like these that say, hey, I see you here, and I appreciate it, carry a lot of value.
* * *
capture
You just brought someone who’s interested in your topic to your blog devoted to that topic. What you do now is exactly the same as I used to do when someone would walk in looking for a bottle of wine and I’d send them home with two cases—you monetize the heck out of every interaction. In this case, you’re not giving people something to drink, you’re giving them something to think about, and ultimately, to talk about. If your content is smart and interesting and eye-catching and entertaining—and if you’re the best, it should be—most people who come to your blog will be happy to become regular readers, viewers, or listeners. Make it easy for them.
We covered the importance of user interface and call-to-action buttons in chapter 6. Call-to-action buttons include:
Subscribe—allows people to opt in to getting an e-mail every time you post a blog
Follow Me—keeps viewers apprised of your tweets and status updates
Join My Fan Page—announces to the viewer’s newsfeed that they think enough of you to be a fan and helps put your site on other people’s radar
Share—makes it easy for viewers to post your link on Facebook, MySpace, etc.
Twitter This
Email This
Your long-term goal is to get sticky and create more and more opportunities to communicate. Your audience joins your fan page. They comment on your blog. They tweet and tumble your posts. And slowly but surely their friends take notice, and start doing the same, and their friends take notice, and suddenly your little community of one explodes into a major metropolis.
the power of one
How do you know when you’ve built a community? When one person is listening. Wine Library TV had five viewers at first.
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Don’t get obsessed with how many friends or fans are following you—the stats are only marginally important. What’s important is the intensity of your community’s engagement and interaction with you. At this point the quality of the conversation is much more revealing than the number of people having it. If your content is making people talk enough so they start to make some noise, I guarantee you’re going to see more people show up to your party. As long as you’re seeing your audience grow, even modestly, over the first four or five months, you’re doing what you’re supposed to do.
* * *
The day you see that one person is reading or watching or listening to you is a day to celebrate. It’s an amazing thing to know someone gives a crap about what’s going on in your world, your life, your brain. Don’t take people for granted. The word-of-mouth power in one interested person has unbelievable reach. Believe me, one day you’ll miss your small, intimate community where you could carry on sustained conversations and get to know people really well. I know I do. (But I still try to get in there daily.)
next steps
Now that you have a community you’ve got someplace to put a killer marketing strategy into play. The one I use is the best in the world and has never failed me.
nine
the best marketing strategy ever
CARE.
Got any questions? E-mail me at
[email protected] ten
make the world listen
Any topic can be turned into a profitable, sustainable social-media-driven business. Let’s see how we could pull together all the tools and concepts we’ve discussed so far to build a business around something really fun and exciting. How about…
Accounting.
Let’s say you start on a Monday. So on Monday, the first day of the rest of your life, you do the following:
1. Go to GoDaddy.com. and try to buy your name, as in first-namelastname.com. If it’s not available, try yourname.tv. Now, I got lucky with a name like Gary Vaynerchuk. Are you a CPA named Robert Smith? Sorry, Robert Smith, you’re screwed. Obviously someone has already bought Robertsmith.com or rob-ertsmithcpa.com. Now’s the time to get creative. How about BobtheBudgetman.tv?
If you can’t come up with anything appropriate or all of your top ideas are unavailable, e-mail me at
[email protected] and we’ll brainstorm together.
Buy both .com and .tv if possible because you never know if you’ll need them and there’s no obligation to launch both. While you’re at it, buy the domain names for your children if you can. In addition, note that every time you hear about a new platform that looks like it’s going to go mainstream, you’ll have to register your user name (Twitter.com/BobtheBudgetman, Facebook.com/BobtheBudgetman, etc.).
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I see no reason to buy any other domain address, like .org or .me, but I could be mistaken about that. As with almost every bit of advice I offer in this book, if your instinct tells you there’s a better way to do things, by all means go with your gut. Prove me wrong! And if you do, I’d love to hear how you did it.
* * *
2. Next, start a Wordpress or Tumblr account. This is the blog site that is going to host the domain you just bought.
3. Next, hire a web designer. I know, I know, I’ve said that production values don’t matter. This is the exception. Having navigated a million badly designed websites, I’ve come to the conclusion that hiring a designer to make sure that you’ve got excellent user interface in the form of properly placed links and buttons is a worthwhile investment. This is the one place where I’m telling you to spend money. You want to create content from a home base, and all this networking is to get new “customers” into the “store.” If it doesn’t look like a nice store or the products aren’t on the proper shelves, you won’t convert, no matter how much hustle and sweat you put in. Imagine spending nine hundred hours promoting th
e new store opening and then thousands of people showing up but sales were lackluster. It’s because your design was not on point.
A service like this will cost you some cash (1–5k), but if you’re on a budget, don’t sweat it. Don’t put off launching your site just because you can’t afford a designer. Start for free and customize later once you can afford it.
If you use Wordpress, there are tons of free Wordpress “themes,” or site designs to choose from. I still think a professional designer will give you a better look and feel, but the Wordpress themes are very good.
4. If you’re filming a video blog, buy the $150 Flip Cam—something small and light, preferably high definition (HD), that you can use anytime, anywhere you’re inspired.
5. Create a Facebook fan page.
6. Open a Twitter account with your domain name.
7. If you’re doing video, open a TubeMogul account. If you’re doing a written blog, sign up for Ping.fm.