Crush It: Nuggets of Wisdom

First order of business – if you have not yet voted for the Battle of the REI Blogs hosted by Patrick Riddle at MustKnowInvesting.com, please briefly read yesterday’s post, watch my video plea, and then go rock the vote (hopefully for me but participate regardless!) Day 1 was pretty wild with over 200 people voting — and let me just say that Julie Broad over at RevNYou.com is NOT PLAYIN’…you go Julie!

Ok, so onto the purpose of this post….I mentioned last week that my latest read was Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It: Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion. In this book, Vaynerchuk talks about how anyone can use the power of the Internet to turn interest (passion) into a real money-generating business. His platform to do this is largely social media — blogs, videos, and websites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Pretty quick read with some great pearls of wisdom — a few of which I wanted to share with my blog readers:

Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business. If you tell your story and you’re good, people will come back for more and tell all their friends (and social media helps immensely with storytelling).
When it comes to content, quality is a tremendous filter on the Internet. Cream always rises to the top no matter how many cups of coffee you pour.
You can monetize any passion, but the level at which you can monetize is impacted by the size of the niche and your ability to differentiate yourself from competitors.
Buy a Flip Cam – its affordable, decent quality, and allows you to deliver your message in an authentic way on the Internet
Someone with less passion and talent and poorer content can totally beat you if they’re willing to work longer and harder than you are. Hustle is it. Without it, you should just pack up your toys and go home.
The best marketing strategy ever? Care.

The book goes into some practical nuts and bolts details on leveraging social media to build your personal brand and your business — obviously covers way more than I mentioned above.

It’s well worth the read. With any book I read, I’m looking for new powerful nuggets of wisdom or information, new perspectives, or perhaps different spins on things I already know. If I can achieve any of those things, its well worth the read. So go buy or borrow a copy of this book. It’s good stuff

shae_bob Speaking of books, I had the awesome pleasure of meeting Bob Burg (co-author of The Go-Giver) over the weekend at an event and he’s simply great! If you ever have the opportunity to hear him speak live, I encourage you to do so!

Finally, I’d love to hear about what books you guys have been reading (or listening to) recently? Would love to get more suggestions. I highly recommend Patrick Riddle’s recommended reading list. Great stuff on there! I’m currently waiting on my copy of No B.S. Time Management by Dan Kennedy to arrive.

Talk to you more later! And don’t forget to vote if you haven’t already for the Battle of the REI Blogs!