Crush It! : NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

Crush It! : NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion 

by Gary Vaynerchuk  

Do you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love. In Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses. Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed here, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand. By the end of this book, readers will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, Crush It! is the ultimate driver’s manual for modern business.

The Story Behind Crush it!

Everything has changed. The social media revolution has irreversibly changed the way we live our lives and conduct our business. There are billions of dollars in advertising moving online, waiting to be claimed by whoever can build the best content and communities. Despite this change, most people keep working at jobs that don’t make them happy and businesses continue to ignore the major marketing and public relations benefits that can be found online.

Myth #1: I’m not passionate about something sexy or popular like wine so these lessons don’t apply to me. 

The internet has drastically decreased the costs of building communities around niche subjects, allowing for even the most obscure subjects to draw enough eyeballs to command advertising attention. Starting a video blog about tortilla chips may seem farfetched until Doritos gives you a call and offers 40,000 a year to sponsor and advertise on your blog. 

Myth #2: My business already has a Twitter account and a Facebook page, we’re set in the social media department. 

This is the equivalent of claiming twenty years ago that just because your business bought a TV spot and a few ads in the newspaper, you didn’t need to pay attention to your advertising department. Social media isn’t about joining in, it’s about being involved. 

Myth #3: I’m happy at my job so this book is irrelevant to me. 

First of all, congratulations on finding work that makes you happy! However, the lessons in this book are valuable to anyone, regardless of their employment status. Crush It will show you how to utilize high level and platform specific social media and marketing strategies that will improve your work. It will also show you how to build a personal brand so that even if you’re forced to leave your job, a situation that’s especially relevant today, you’ll be able to easily find employment elsewhere in a field you’re passionate about. 

Myth #4: I need to quit my job to take advantage of this book’s entrepreneurial lessons. 

While the entrepreneurial strategies in this book do take time, it’s completely reasonable to start the effort as an after-work project to build up until you’re able to replace your current income with the income from your online presence. While you may have to fall behind on the current season of Lost or let your Madden 2010 game suffer, because you’ll be doing something you love you won’t mind putting in the extra effort. 

In Crush It, Gary Vaynerchuk shows how anyone can build a career around what they’re passionate about. He also delivers both high-level and platform specific strategy and analysis, allowing you to take advantage of the current business environment while preparing you to succeed as it changes and evolves. 

This book isn’t interested in making unrealistic promises while glossing over the work involved. Making a living by building content around your passion isn’t simple and it doesn’t happen overnight. What it is, however, is fulfilling and in most cases just as profitable, if not more so, than your previous job. 

Furthermore, a business can’t just pay lip service to social media and expect it to return results. The transparency and accountability inherent in its structure necessitates a comprehensive and dedicated strategy in order to reap its tremendous benefits. 

By combining practical analysis and strategy with the same passion and humor that’s made Gary one of the most in demand keynote speakers in the U.S. as well as network television’s go to wine expert, Crush It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand and harness the future of business and work. 

Learn: Why social media has evened the playing field, destroying the “gate-keepers” who had previously dictated the distribution of content.

Learn: How to beat unemployment and create wealth-building opportunities by building and maintaining a personal brand. 

Learn: Why storytelling is the most important business concept in the current marketplace. 

Learn: How you can build an online business around your passion without quitting your day job. 

Learn: Why Twitter and Facebook are just tools and not a social media strategy. 

Learn: How to take advantage of the half-billion dollars in advertising that are moving to the internet. 

Learn: Why transparency and being true to yourself are now winning marketing formulas. 

Learn: How to build and maintain an online community around your passion and brand. 

Learn: Strategies for turning attention into money. 

Learn: Why the legacy element of the internet era is so underrated.

From Publishers Weekly

Yet another rallying cry to the banner of turning your passion into a career, from braggadocio-ridden entrepreneur Vaynerchuk. After taking over his father's local liquor store, Shopper's Discount Liquors, and building it from a $4 million business to a $50 million one, he created the wine-tasting blog Wine Library TV and discovered the power of the Internet for driving sales. This book shares his experience and step-by-step advice for using Twitter, Facebook, etc., and suggestions for monetizing an online persona, reiterating that the Internet makes it possible for anyone to make serious cash by turning what they love most into their personal brand. His enthusiasm is admirable and his advice solid, but there's nothing new here, and his unappealing swagger—repeated stories of how he crushed it and dominated grate particularly—gives his story more the tone of adolescent peacocking than of worthwhile and sober business advice. (Oct.) 

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Customer’s Review

“Gary is a force of nature. His authentic, raw passion and caring touches everyone. His insights into social media & his message of opportunity could not be more timely.” (Tony Robbins)

“Gary was the first person to push me on the importance of personal brand and transparency – this was months before anyone was talking about it, he’s always two steps ahead of anyone else.” (Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg.com)

“Anyone looking to supercharge their career should beg, borrow, and steal to learn Gary Vee’s techniques. He reinvented the rules to build a $60-million business from scratch—on his own terms.” (Tim Ferriss, #1 NY Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek)

“Gary Vaynerchuk is one of those entrepreneurs who has discovered the secret to combining passion with business. He is always an inspiration and always entertaining. You owe it to yourself to read this book!” (Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com)

“Gary Vaynerchuk has become a walking, talking (and oh, such talking!), webbing and Tweeting example of how believing in what you do and keeping it fun can step up your life in all ways. There is nobody I would rather talk sports with—or wine or life.” (Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition Saturday on NPR)

About the Author

gary vay*ner*chuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multifaceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local retail wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. Gary has always had an early-to-market approach, launching Wine Library’s retail website in 1997 and Wine Library TV in February of 2006.  His lessons on social media, passion, transparency, and reactionary business are not to be missed!

“Legacy is greater than currency.” 

For those looking for step by step instructions on how to develop a social media strategy and the specific tools to execute, this book has some of that, but it’s more about inspiration than “how to”.  To get anything out of a workshop or testing social tools yourself, you need to be inspired first anyway.

“Crush It” is an excellent book offering personal stories that illustrate the importance of passion, patience, hustle and the value of doing what you need to do to be happy. Success takes hard work and this book does a great job of showing anyone the framework for making what really makes them passionate and turn it into an online business.After reading this book, I can imagine a significant number of people gaining the inspiration to start their own ventures with passion, hustle and a desire to “crush it”. ( Lee Odden : www.toprankblog.com)