Why now is the time to Crush It!

Why now is the time to Crush It!. Cash in on your Passion is the tittle of a book written by Gary Vaynerchuk which I red some time ago. In this post I’m going to talk about it for two reasons: in case you don´t know this guy you will start to know him, and you will like him; and if you already know him, it’s always good to make a recall on the book and receive some extra motivation.

For the ones who don´t know him I will make a brief intro about Gary Vaynerchuk:

He is the author of Wine Library Tv a videoblog about wine. The family business! He was born in Belarus but emigrated to USA when he was just a child. Some time after arriving to America his family started to build a business around wine. He started to work on the family business since he was very young. In the second half of the 90’s he starts the online platform for the offline wine family-business and they burst the incomes.

In february 2006 he starts Wine Library Tv, composed of a daily monday-to-friday episode. Begginings are allways tough, but hard work, passion and constancy made him develop a big personal brand and so the family business grew crazy.

Here you can watch a must-see video from his presentation at Web 2.0 Expo NY 08 (Really worth watching it!):

I really recommend you reading his book, where he talks mainly about how important it is to build a personal brand. Really inspiring! In case you don’t have time right now to read the whole book I would like to write you a checklist of all the steps he covers on how to build your personal brand, so you can start with it right after finishing reading this post:

1. Identify your passion

2. Make sure you can think of at least fifty awesome blog topics to ensure stickiness.

3. Answer the following:

   Am I sure my passion is that I think it is?

   Can I talk about it better than anyone else?

4. Name your personal brand.

5. Buy your user name- .com and .tv, if possible

6. Choose your medium: video, audio, written word.

7. Start a Wordpress or Tumblr account.

8. Hire a designer.

9. Include a Facebook Connect link, Share Functions…etc

10. Create a facebook Fan Page

11. Sign up for a Ping.fm and select all of the platforms to which you want to distribute your content (Twitter and Facebook are imperative)

12. Post your content.

13. Start creating community by leaving comments on other people’s blog

14. Use Twitter Search to find as many people as possible talking about your topic, and communicate with them.

15. Search for more blogs relevant to your subject.

16. Join as many active Facebook fan pages and groups relating to your blog topic as possible

17. Repeat steps 12 to 16 over and over and over again.

18. When you feel your personal brand has gained sufficient attention and stickiness, start reaching out to advertisers and begin monetizing.

And remember, if you are not 100% happy with what you are doing, stop, think and change what you are doing. We, at muyart.com are having a lot of fun, we are learning loads of new things, meeting a lot of interesting people and working really hard on something that is our passion. Cause now is the time to crush it!