A friend recently asked me if I was concerned about diminishing quality since I’m forcing myself to post so frequently. The thought has definitely crossed my mind, but I believe that forcing myself to write something every day for public consumption will improve my writing. I’ve only been blogging daily for the last month or so, and I can already see the difference in how I think about things or approach questions that I want to explore. Hopefully I’ll continue to improve my ability to translate this into a form that readers can understand and benefit from.

That said, this same friend also suggested an alternative strategy of spending a certain amount of time every day working on a post, but only publishing once a week. The advantage of such an approach would be that it retains the daily discipline of writing, but I would have the opportunity to go deeper and explore topics more thoroughly than I’m able to most days. I may try this approach next month.

While I’m on this topic, let me also encourage you to comment or contact me and let me know what posts you enjoy, which could be improved, and what you’d like to hear more about.

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1. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk

This week is my three year anniversary of quitting my last job. It’s been a rough and interesting ride, and I constantly find myself feeling like maybe now I’m just starting to get it. Hopefully I’ll keep learning and growing and I’ll look back at this blog post in a few years and chuckle at how little I knew. That’s ok, as long as I’m learning, growing, and having fun.

Anyway, I don’t want to get too sappy, just wanted to say thank you to all of those out there who have had the courage and imagination to take that leap of faith and fly solo. You’re making the world a better place and you inspire and challenge me every day.

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1. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
2. I dream, therefore I am.
3. For bigger things

I recently read Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk and I enjoyed it enough that I thought I’d post a short review.

For those of you who don’t know, Gary is a very successful entrepreneur who has really pushed the limits of social media and proven that you can build a powerful brand in a short period of time with nothing more than hustle and imagination. Gary started his social media empire with Wine Library TV, an online video show about wine that helped grow his family’s retail wine and liquor store into the beginnings of an empire that does tens of millions per year in revenue. Nearly 100,000 people watch the show. He later expanded into blogging and videos on social media and personal branding. He has hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook and nearly a million followers on Twitter. Impressive, to say the least.

Crush It! is the first book of a 10-book deal that Gary signed with HarperStudio and covers how to get started with social media and personal branding, no matter what your interests are. It’s a short read, maybe an evening or two, and it’s more motivational and strategic than tactical, though there’s definitely some practical advice. The three primary points of the book are:

• Find your passion and talk about it, relentlessly
• Build an audience, which may take time
• Be yourself

Gary’s primary point in the book is that social media has broken down the traditional barriers to building an audience so that now anyone can make an income off their passion, no matter what it is. This claim seems dubious, but he illustrates it with the example of worms. Say you love worms more than anything…you could do a blog and podcast about worms, and you could do so from several angles: fishing, the study of worms, worm farms, whatever. His point is that you by being passionate and authentic and creating an audience of other worm-lovers out there (and they are out there), you can make a good living off of it.

I tend to agree with him, partly because I’ve seen an awful lot of bloggers making a lot of money over the last few years writing about tiny niche topics, and partly because there are more than a billion people online and more joining everyday, and it just stands to reason that for almost anything you can possibly be passionate about, there’s a market-size group of people out there who care about it too.

Gary talks about how Wine Library TV only had five viewers when he started, but he just kept creating good content and engaging whatever fans he had, and today you can see the results. Another of his big points is that you may have to spend years working at it to really build the audience you’ll need to live off your passion. This might sound like a long time, but if you’re doing it because you love it and you’re having fun, does it matter?

One of the points he comes back to most often is the idea of just being yourself. Users can smell people being fake from a mile away, so the only way to build a valuable audience is to be honest and authentic. The only real question I had that the book didn’t answer was: what if you’re not the type of person who a) has a passion, or b) enjoys developing an online personal brand. However, I don’t fall under either of those categories, so I enjoyed the book. However, if you’re not really into Twitter or Facebook or blogging or online video or whatever, then maybe the book won’t appeal to you like it did to me.

The book has inspired me in several ways: first, I’ve renewed my efforts to stay engaged in the current communities that I participate in. Second, I’m going to be revamping my personal brand and making this site simpler and more expressive this year. Finally, I’m going to relaunch Bounteo.com, a site I started almost three years ago to talk about personal finance, investing, career development, and entrepreneurship, all from the perspective of young adults in the 20-35 age bracket. Unfortunately, I let the site languish and haven’t done anything with it for the last 18 months or so, which I really regret. I wonder what it could be right now if I had really focused on it. Maybe more like this. However, there’s no time like the present to turn things around, so stay tuned.

And buy this book.

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Almost exactly three months ago, I stopped blogging, pretty much stopped using Twitter, stopped doing most of my daily habits, stopped worrying about my goals, and started working 14-16 hours per day on MightyBrand, a new startup that I’ve been toiling away at for awhile. I stopped doing freelance work, stopped working on side projects, etc. In short, I cut out almost everything in my life that I could so I could focus on MightyBrand.

If you’ve ever started a company, you know that it’s an emotional rollercoaster, and the first few months can be positively euphoric. The feedback and interest we’ve received on MightyBrand has been fantastic, and we’re just now wrapping up some major development projects that we’re very excited to launch. But working 16 hours per day on anything takes its toll, and the time has come for me to get back into a more balanced routine. Motivation is a powerful driving force, and I’m really surprised at how fiercely and how far it’s carried us, but relying solely on the emotion of motivation is not sustainable. It’s time to buckle down and get back to a habit-based approach to productivity.

I’m glad to be back into a “normal” routine again and I’m looking forward to sharing more details of what we’re doing over at MightyBrand.

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1. Feeds – Reading other bloggers and content sites out there is always good inspiration and a good way to keep your pulse on what’s happening on the Internet. Additionally, it gives you cool stuff to link to and tell your readers about. I’ve fallen a bit behind on my feeds lately, so I’m digging back in with gusto, searching for new blogs to read, and ditching the ones that aren’t inspiring me anymore.
2. Running – I used to run in the mornings, but lately I just haven’t been making time. When I run, I listen to music, but I also think a lot about the topics that I blog about. There’s something about just hitting the street and taking off on a 3 mile run up to the edge of the Bay and stopping to take in the view that gets my creative juices flowing. Pretty soon, I’m trying to remember all the awesome ideas I have until I can get back and write them down. Now that I have my iPhone, I can run with it and record my ideas on the go.
3. Blogging – Nothing helps grease the writing gears like actually writing. The best cure for writer’s block is to write anyway. It may not be good, but at least you’ll have written something. Over time, you’ll find that writer’s block happens less frequently, as your mind is prepared to write regardless of how you feel.

So there you have it. If you see that I’m not blogging much, please ask me why…I need the kick in the butt.

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Seven Tips for Organic Twitter Branding

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• Do you like the design overall?
• Do you see any issues in your browser? (if so, what browser and OS?)
• Is the navigation confusing at all?
• Is there anything obvious missing?
• Are the fonts readable?

In case anyone is interested, this is a 100% from scratch WordPress 2.5 theme based on a design that my good friend Ben Lew whipped up for me almost six months ago.  So far, the plugins I’m running are just Akismet, Feedburner, and SearchEverything (to filter out pages and certain categories from search results).  The flash image slideshow is SlideShowPro with a custom script that pulls images from a set in my Flickr account.  If anyone is interested in the overall setup of the taxonomy, pages, etc, I’ll be glad to detail it all in another post.

If I had to do it again, I would use Drupal, primarily due to the better taxonomy control.  But WordPress has worked out well and I’m excited to see things grow.  I still have a fair bit of content to get in here, especially projects.  Other things I plan on adding in the future are a specific page layout for projects, as well as leveraging tags on both posts and projects.  One other thing I would like to add is a place to list pages that fall under one of the five major areas of the site (Blogger, Consultant, etc).  Any ideas?

Anyway, I’m glad it’s finally done and I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Thanks!

UPDATE: I’m getting reports from some users who are seeing just a big empty grey box in the header area of the site, instead of the photos that should be appearing.  If you see this, please leave a comment and let me know what browser / OS you’re running and what version of Flash you have installed (if you know).  Thanks!

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1. New theme for Bounteo.com

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1. Bounteo.com is live
2. New theme is finally up!
3. I dream, therefore I am.

We’ve just thrown up a slightly modified template and there’s not much in the way of content yet, but please check it out and let me know what you think. We’ve got lots of quality content on the way, so stay tuned!

Oh, and we’re looking for guest bloggers as well, so if you have ideas for posts, please contact us at mightybrand at gmail dot com. Thanks!

Projects launched in May 2008: 2 (1 client, 1 personal)

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