Blogging and social media for your business

This is a 5 or 6 year old keynote speech by Gary Vaynerchuk on his concept of The "Thank you" Economy.  Gary was an entrepreneur from childhood who later used email and YouTube to build his dad's New Jersey liquor store from a $3 million to $60+ million business in about five or six years.  Then he took off on his own and started VaynerMedia, a digital marketing agency that focuses on Fortune 100 companies.  Gary knows his stuff, he cusses like a sailor (from Jersey), and he has this crazy idea that businesses should actually give a damn about their customers.  He's been throwing these ideas out for years, and most businesses still don't get it.  So if you own a business, or are working on building one (like me), you should listen to this.

Officially, I've never owned an actual business, though taxi driving operates like a small business.  I did that for 6 1/2 years.  Back in the 80's and 90's, I worked for several entrepreneurs in the BMX and skateboard world, including Bob Osborn at Wizard Publications, Bob Morales at the AFA, Brad Dorfman and Don Hoffman at Vision/Unreel Productions, Scot Breithaupt at Last Minute Productions (very well named), and Chris Moeller at S&M Bikes when it was actually run out of a garage.  I wanted to own my own business, but I was super shy and didn't have the personality to sell stuff, so I became a kind of professional sidekick to young and motivated entrepreneurs.  It beat the hell out of going to college.  You can't get that kind of education in business school.

After spending two decades working all kinds of jobs and, more importantly, working through most of my personal issues, I landed in North Carolina in November, 2008, broke, as the Great Recession set in.  I had been in the taxi business as it went down the tubes due to new technology.  I was a serious Luddite in 2008.  I didn't know a damn thing about computers and technology.  But suddenly I was out of work, living with my parents in a small NC town, and unable to find any job.  I also had their computer in the room I stayed in.  So I started "surfing the web," as we used to call it.   I soon started blogging seriously about my adventures working at FREESTYLIN' and BMX Action magazines in 1986.  I had actually blogged a bit about taxi driving in 2007, but faded on it.  It seemed only my mom and the local police read my blog. 

I soon learned I had a knack for blogging.  I also soon learned that it's really easy to piss off your former co-workers with a blog.  I was super depressed back then, I'd just lost all my creative work on the move to NC.  All my bike and skate magazines, my DVD's, my master tapes of videos I'd produced, nearly 20 years worth of great raw footage of BMX and skating, and ten years worth of pretty good poetry that I'd written.  I blogged mostly just to vent.  I didn't think anyone would actually read it.  Seriously, I didn't.  I just wanted my stories of my BMX days recorded somewhere for future generations.  And, let's face it, you can't watch porn all the time. 

About a month after I started blogging, I wrote a post about a certain female photographers boobs.  It really wasn't pervy, it was about me turning into a mute idiot when she started talking about a female issue one day.  Something weird happened.  That post went viral in the old school BMX online community.  I didn't know there was an old school BMX community online.  I kept blogging and started reconnecting with old friends from the BMX and skate worlds I hadn't talked to in many years.

I began to realize that the internet thing was actually good for something.  I also realized that I needed to understand this new world of tech if I was ever going to make a living as a writer again.  Now, in 2018, I've been blogging consistently for the 10 years since.  I've written probably 3,000 to 4,000 blog posts across several blogs.  Most blogs I took down in a real dark time after my dad's death in 2012.  After about a year of blogging about BMX and still not finding a job, someone emailed me and said, "You know people make money with blogs... right?"  I didn't know.

So I intuitively started learning about how people used blogs to make money.  And I soon learned many of them seemed to be scammers and spammers.  But not all of them.  The job hunt never got much better.  I drove a taxi for a year here, but that doesn't pay worth crap.  And I get fat sitting in a taxi all day, sleeping in parking lots at night, and eating fast food.  I couldn't afford an apartment when I drove a cab here.

A little over two years ago, I made the decision to focus on my weird Sharpie artwork as a way to build a small business which would eventually let me get back to writing as well.  I blogged and used social media to promote my artwork.  I started with a bedroom "studio" (a card table) in the apartment I shared with my mom.  I didn't have a dime to my name.  Seriously, not a freakin' dime on day one.  I had a cheap tablet of sketching paper and a bunch of Sharpie markers.  I had a piece-of-crap, old, refurbished laptop running Windows XP (in 2015).  It crashed two weeks later.  I bought a new one with money from artwork.

A little over two years later, I'm homeless, I have my art hanging on walls for sale in two businesses here in Winston-Salem, and I have a 4 or 5 week backlog on drawings to do.  I'm making about a third of a living right now.  Not enough to rent a place to live full time... yet.  But my artwork is taking off, I'm making money from it, and I'm starting to get to a place where I can charge a decent amount for the original drawings.  I still haven't had the money to make prints or posters to sell yet.  That and other ideas are coming soon.

What I have done fairly well, though, is use what I've learned about blogging and social media to promote what I'm doing.  For free.  And now I'm going to do a whole series of blog posts to share that with all of you.  I've just been asked to blog and do some social media promotion for a local art studio, and I'm going to explain what I'm doing in this blog as I do it.  Hopefully it will be helpful to some of you out there.  As Gary Vaynerchuk has often said, "The internet is fucking amazing."  People don't get just how big this period of change is.  So watch that video above if possible.  That will help set the stage, because the mindset Gary talks about is so freaking important.

OK, more tomorrow.