Book Review: Gary Vaynerchuk’s ‘Crush It’

Book cover for Gary Vaynerchuk knows a lot about how to use social media to build your personal brand online. He is the founder of Wine Library TV and the author of Crush It – a book about how to use social media to start your own business and live your passion. I recently read his book and found it to be useful and motivating for anyone who is starting up their own business.

In Crush It, Vaynerchuk explains that there is no reason why anyone should continue to stay in a job that they hate when we “live in an age of unmatched opportunity for anyone with enough hustle, patience and big dreams.” His book outlines the steps he took when he walked away from running his father’s business to start Wine Library TV and be part of an online community to talk about his passion for wine tasting.

Vaynerchuk’s success started with a simple video blog and a dedication to live his passion every day. @GaryVee, as he’s known on Twitter, explains in his book that even if your passion happens to be the World of Warcraft, you can turn that passion into an online media business and build your personal brand equity around that passion with enough drive and dedication.

When it comes to marketing, Vaynerchuk has just one, extremely short chapter in Crush It which covers the most important element of marketing your own business. This chapter is in fact so short that it takes up just one page with one simple word in large, bold font. That word is “care.” He implies that if you truly care about the content that you are creating and care about your customers then that is all you need to do in order to make your business thrive in a word of mouth marketing world.

Vaynerchuck’s book is only 142 pages long, so it’s definitely worth a quick read. He outlines the multiple social media tools that he used to make his Wine Library TV website a worldwide phenomenon and gives suggestions on how best to do it yourself. He also provides a list of ways to start monetizing your content as you go.

If you want to hear Gary Vaynerchuk speak at the Art of Marketing conference in Toronto on March 7th, the organizers have provided a discount code which saves attendees $50 per ticket or $100 per ticket in groups of 3 or more. The promo code is TV23 and you can use this link to register.

Vaynerchuk is a pretty inspiring speaker. To give you a taste of what you can expect at the conference, here is a video of Gary Vaynerchuk speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York from a few years ago: