Are you ready to open?

Being in business for yourself and being successful in business for yourself can be different. Gary Vaynerchuk explains in his book Crush it (linked below), that now is the time to define and pursue your passion.

In a recent interview in Professional Photographer magazine, Gary gives us 21 steps to building your brand.

1. Identify your passion – If you aren’t doing what you love to do then you probably are not as happy as you could be.
2. Make sure you can think of at least 50 blog topics – Very important to getting people to follow what you are doing.
3. Answer these questions:
   • Am I sure that I correctly defined my passion?
   • Can I talk about my passion better than anyone else?
4. Name your personal brand.  Have a clear idea of who you are – “The connoisseur of cookware” – “the no BS real-estate-agent”
5. Buy your name on Godaddy – Get the .com and the .tv
6. Choose how you are going to communicate with your audience – video, audio or the written word
7. Start a WordPress or Tumblr account
8. Hire a designer for your site
9. Include a Facebook connect link, call-to-action buttons, share functions, and a button that invites people to do business with you.  Place these in a prominent place on your blog.
10. Create a Facebook Fan page
11. Sign up for a Ping.fm or TubeMogul account and select which platforms to which you want to distribute your content.  Twitter and Facebook are necessary and you can select others as you like.
12. Post your content
13. Start creating community by leaving comments on other people’s blogs and forums and replying to comments to your own comment.
14. Use Twitter Search to find as many people as possible talking about your topic, and begin communicating with them.
15. Use Google Blogsearch to find more blogs that are relevant to your subject.
16. Join as many active Facebook fan pages and groups relating to your blog topic as possible
17. Repeat steps 12-16 over and over and over and over and over.
18. Do it again
19. and again
20. When you feel that your personal brand has gained sufficient attention and stickiness, start reaching out to advertisers and begin monetizing.
21. Enjoy the ride.