Crush It! (8 page)
Authors: Gary Vaynerchuk
create community: digging your internet trench
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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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ared 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 trenches, 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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t 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.
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.
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ou 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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on’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.
the best marketing strategy ever
make the world listen
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ny 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.).
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 prod
ucts 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 the 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.
8. Start pumping out content. Let’s say you’re charismatic and have good screen presence and decide to do a series of videos called Fun Facts from the CPA. Every night you post a video of yourself explaining tax rules in your unique, informative, entertaining way, educating your audience yet also revealing why you are passionate about what some might think a dry, esoteric subject. Talk about whatever you like, as long as it doesn’t get you in trouble with your parent company. For example, explain how the recent change in the presidential administration might affect
the ordinary taxpayer. What really happens if a person misses the April 15 deadline? What strategic fiscal issues should a small company consider before deciding to grow? Put as much content out there as you can. There are people in your field who will hate you because you’ll be offering up information for free for which they often charge. That’s okay. When viewers need accounting help, whom are they going to want to do business with, the guys who hoarded information or the person who proved himself to be open and honest and generous?
Find a way to incorporate some personal stories and details into your posts. Use anecdotes from your own life to illustrate concepts. Let your personality shine so that eventually people who have no need for accounting information are coming to hear you just because it’s you.
9. Tweet or post your content via Ping.fm or TubeMogul to distribute it to all of your chosen platforms.
10. Go to Search.Twitter and start searching accounting terms, like “taxes,” “401(k),” “accounts payable,” and anything else that might be relevant to your blog topic. Start following many of these, keeping in mind that Twitter does not allow you to follow more than 10 percent of the people who are following you, or better yet, @reply them publicly.
11. Next, go to Blogsearch.Google.com (or go to Google, click on “More,” and choose “Blogs” from the pull-down menu). Start typing in general terms, like “taxes” and “filing,” and search all the obvious keywords. For every blog where you find a mention of these terms, you’re going to leave a comment and your name, which should be linked to your homepage.
12. Search the term “accountant” on Facebook. Click on the
tab for “All Results,” then click on “Pages.” There are hundreds of fan pages, some with nine members, some with thousands. Join as many active ones as possible, but make sure to keep track of them all. When you’re done, hit the tab for “Groups” and do the same thing. Although I don’t recommend creating your own group, there’s no reason you shouldn’t get your name on any preexisting ones that are relevant to your passion.
13. Rinse and repeat.
You will do steps 5 and 8 through 12 over and over and over again for as long as your brand exists. If that sounds tedious or repetitive, just close this book and go do your best to enjoy the life you’ve got because you’re not cut out for this. If you’re willing to hustle, though, you’ll find you don’t get tired of the hunt because every conversation you start up is another opportunity to talk about something you love more than anything else. What’s boring about that?
a few additional steps
1. Don’t forget to include a list of all of your social network links (such as Twitter.com/GaryVee) on your e-mail signature, letterhead, and business cards.
2. Make sure you have a big fat button on your site that says, “Want to Do Business with Me?” or something along those lines.
We’re thinking of this brand building as a marathon, not a sprint, right? So right now, that button will just be there as a re
minder of where you’re ultimately going with your brand. It’s unlikely you’re going to get biz dev offers right off the bat, but you never know. More likely, as you build your community you will see the following progression:
- Enthusiastic fans
- Free product offers from businesses that notice your growing fan base
- Biz dev deals from individuals smart enough to see they need to do business with you while you’re still affordable
One of my favorite mantras is “Anything is better than zero,” but true to my contradictory nature, let me just say that the longer you hold out to monetize your blog, the better. Everyone’s financial situation is different and you may feel compelled to take some of the first offers you get, from advertisers, for example. Try to wait, not just because the stronger and bigger your audience, the more cash you can demand when the time is right, but because as soon as you start focusing on monetizing, by necessity you will start to pay less attention to your content and your community.
When you’re ready, though, the opportunities to monetize your personal brand will blow your mind.