Crushing It – Gary Vaynerchuk Book Review

How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business & Influence – & How You Can, Too

Recently I read Crushing It written by Gary Vaynerchuk. It was a great book, but maybe I read his book in the wrong order! haha. Gary has written a couple books now and this one is his most recent book. Being his newest book I thought it would give me the most tips for today’s social media age.

Some of you may be wondering who Gary Vaynerchuk is. To me, Gary is known as the social media and branding king. Growing up his dad had a wine store and he decided to start a you tube channel talking about wines. The channel ended up blowing up, so he ventured into other social media sources to promote their brands of stores. Well business grew and grew, they started shipping wines to clients. Well now hes a multi millionaire, who runs these stores, has his own wines, owns Vaynermedia (A branding company) and wants to one day own the Jets.

Gary is all about hustling and grinding. He even has a awesome series called trash talk on you tube. If you haven’t seen it I suggest you check it out. Here’s this guy, who is super successful and yet still go’s garage saling to show everyone how easy it is to make a buck these days. He’s buying stuff at garage sales and flipping them on e-bay. Making hundreds a day!

Anyways back to the Book

As I mentioned earlier I should of read this one after reading the original “crush it”. This one was a lot like Dave Ramsey’s – Total Money Makeover. Obviously a whole different subject but the book was written in the same manor. He talks about a topic and then there will be a page or 2 of some persons experience after they implemented what he was talking about after reading the original crush it . The changes are pretty dramatic and shows how much we should be at least putting a effort into branding ourselves or our business.

Gary stress’s to just start! Whatever you want to do, Just start. I have done a post on that about finances. So many of us, myself included feel we need to become a pro or semi pro at whatever we want to do, before we even start. We all have something we could start blogging about or monetize online from.

By starting you can learn from your mistakes and with social media you can just delete the content. I can tell you, when I started blogging, twitter, pinterest, facebook business page and instagram I wasn’t remotely a pro. I free styled it and things have turned out pretty good.

There is a whole chapter on how the world is shifting. Everyone has cellphones now, we are hooked and always online. The biggest brands in the world have now made advertisements on different social media platforms a huge percentage of their overall advertising budget. This is where the people are! This alone should really show you how much you need to be involved in the social media spaces.

Facebook

Out of every social media platform Gary says everyone should have a business facebook page! Who would of thought. Out of every platform, that is the one everyone should be on. Currently facebook has over 2.27 billion monthly active users and is the place to be to promote your brand.  Its a great platform and facebook live offers a even better experience for you to connect with your followers. This is something, I want to start doing! So many people spend sooo much time scrolling facebook, your brand should be on their feed.

Id love it if you followed me on there! Go ahead, I’ll wait. =)

Twitter

Twitter is more for news and talking he states. I couldn’t agree more. It is personally my favorite and most active platform. I feel being in the finance community twitter really excels. Its real time, we can discuss stocks or issues instantly. I love it! There are a lot of people who feel the same, look at Donald Trump or Elon Musk. They like twitter because its unedited and instantaneous.

Snapchat

Snapchat is one I have not gotten into and don’t think I will get into. This platform is basically a less dolled up platform then instagram. Take a quick pic or vid in real time, don’t edit it and put it online. I think Dj Khalid made his way up thanks to this platform. Man did he ever kill it on here, even his son has a snapchat account. Crazy!

Youtube

Got to love youtube! Our dryer broke the other day, what did I do right away? Youtubed it! Bam this is whats wrong, do this and its fixed. O.k. I did it and now the dryer works perfectly. The guy put that video up ages ago and continues to make money from it. That is a sweet platform. My son used to watch those kinder egg vid’s all the time, now he watches this guy play various nintendo switch games. That guy records him playing games and talks to himself, uploads the vids and makes millions!

When I was a silver stacker I created a youtube channel showing the new coins and bars I bought. The first couple episodes were not too good, but I still gained followers. Heck I haven’t worked on that channel in like 4 years and I’m still getting subscribers. This is such a great way to monetize anything and brand your business. Being a landscaper I could upload a quick vid of the job and add our logo on it. Bam done, its there for everyone to see. Gary mentions how Youtube is gaining more tv time than your actual tv. I couldn’t agree more!

Instagram

Oh how everyone loves instagram now. Parents are on facebook, so kids go here to post their pics of what they are up to for everyone to see. Its another huge platform, based specifically on pictures and hashtags. People should be here. I actually started a account after reading this book, if you want to see more on my personal life this will be the place to go. Its a great way to show yourself to the world. You can take little vids for either your timeline or story or pics. I’m just getting used to this one, but so far I enjoy it.

I can tell you for sure brands are here to work with influencer’s. Passive Canadian Income just started and already had 2 offers to work with those companies. I denied both because they have nothing to do with the site or me, but hey they are there.

Musical.ly, Podcasts and Voice-First

There’s also a chapter on each of these but I don’t even know if Musical.ly is even around anymore. Ive never heard of it. Podcasts are great and I listen to a bunch of them. Voice First is the siri and google home things. Gary thinks in a couple years people will just talked to Alexa or Google and maybe we should start working on doing voice first stuff now to get ahead of the curve.

Conclusion

The book didn’t even really mention pinterest surprisingly. Essentially it just states how much every brand or business should be on all these platforms to improve their game. Another big key was to not use the same material on each platform. They are all different and people are on those platforms for different reasons. Try to make each piece of content unique to the type of social media platform you are using.

I think the book will help me, since I taught me how to use each media source differently and also got me onto instagram. The book was great, and also changed the way I look at advertisements while I’m on different platforms. The world is on social media more and more, we should do our best to be there too.

I read this book in under a week, that always tells me how good it was. I just started reading another book of his Jab,Jab, Jab, Right Hook and will let you know how that was once Im done with it as well.

If you interested in purchasing this book feel free to use my amazon affiliate link here. If not rent it from your Library!

Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too

What is your favorite platform to be on?

cheers!

Rob

Hey I’m Rob, creator of Passive Canadian Income.

In 2011 me and my wife had almost $60,000 in debt and a negative $7,000 Net Worth. Through hard work and financial education we paid all that off. Now we are focusing on increasing our Passive Income Streams to make the money work for us. Feel Free to Follow along the Journey by clicking the Social Media links below or subscribing to get notified of new posts on the sidebar.