I really liked Gary Vay-ner-chuck’s book Crush It! I’ just finished reading the book on my kindle, which in all honesty was quite short, but the message was clear and concise.
Crush it is probably the oppposite of what is preached by Tim Ferriss in 4 hour work week [another great book], where Tim discusses the huge importance of outsourcing everything and anything that is possible. Including outsourcing the creation and management of your social media and online dating profiles.
Gary’s message could not be any more different than that, in fact from watching one of his videos I understood that at one point Gary created a Wine Library TV app for facebook where he manually answers all the mundane and monotonous wine questions to anyone who has the app.
Gary is all about hard work and grafting to making a business successful. Which may be strange to hear from a business guru these days. Gary preaches doing only the thing you love, crafting out a microniche in which you are madly passionate and in love with, something you would devote your time doing anyway even if you weren’t making money from. For instance, a blue collar dad who spends his entire weeked watching football, whose passionate and has a lot to say about football. Why not set up a weekly ustream channel where you broadcast your thoughts and commentaries online, something you probably would have done anyway?
Now I agree with Gary’s approach to a certain extent. I’ve been involved with web business for quite some time, I’ve been doing this full time for a year. So I know a thing or two about making money online. I know that having a passion for your subject matter is vitally important, without it, you’ll crash and burn.
However, I think another part of the issue is that you need to have some direction as far as business is concerned, you have to follow the money and not just make a crapshoot into thin air and hope for the best, which I’m afraid a lot of inexperienced people who have never run a business before, are in risk of doing.
What I got out of this book was work hard and reap the rewards, sometimes you need to read/watch a guy like Gary Vaynerchuck at play, to get a kick up your backside to get back into being authentic and interacting with your audience. Something that I don’t do much in my affiliate marketing business model