Gary Vaynerchuk has grown to become one of the most recognizable business speakers on the internet. He regularly motivates his followers and offers them advice and wisdom.
Gary is most known for his digital marketing agency, Vayner Media, but successfully grew a wine retailer through a YouTube channel.
Although he’s not an SEO, his experience in digital marketing is transferable.
Most SEO’s can learn the most from people outside of the industry. The world of SEO is relatively exclusive and niche. Being close minded like this can leave gaps in your skill set, causing you to leave money on the table.
Build your brand alongside your business
If you learn one thing from Gary Vaynerchuk, it’s that a personal brand can be stronger than any corporate brand.
People sign on as clients of his agency because they want to work with Gary. They believe in his vision and his skills.
Even though he’ll have a small influence on any of the work done, he is the main attraction.
As someone who is running a business, you have the option to become the personification of your brand.
Hugh Hefner became the embodiment of his brand. He lived the playboy lifestyle so that the brand could grow.
It’s tough for potential customers to become overly attached to a corporate identity. However, it’s much easier to form a connection with a real person.
Creating a blog or a video series is an excellent way to add personality to your company. Represent it every single day and build your customer base because of your own brand.
Gary chose the path of YouTube videos because it is what suits his energetic personality. But for you, it might be blog posts or short social media videos. Perhaps you’ll start a podcast and has guests on.
There is no overnight success
The idea of overnight success is a myth. People will say that Gary Vaynerchuk just ‘blew up.’ But you don’t see the hours of endless work that came before that.
His first YouTube channel was called Wine Library TV and has thousands of videos. He committed to creating a video almost every single day for years.
Every successful person had to work for days, for months, for years to get to where they are now.
PBN’s seem like the quickest and easiest way to skyrocket your rankings. All of these shortcuts come with a price.
Committing to the process and having patience is key. When asked for advice, Gary almost always suggests that people exercise patience.
Success takes years of hard work, and a lot of SEO’s would rather hear the quick trick to ranking.
Instead, choose to publish high quality content and use sound marketing techniques to grow your brand over the next year. You’ll be shocked how much better links from real websites affect your rankings compared to PBN’s and spam blog comments.
Work super hard
The idea of no overnight success means that you need to have patience. But you also need to work super hard during that extended period.
It’s not enough to just be patient. Gary often talks about having patience at the macro level and speed at a micro level.
What this means is that every day you need to be hustling as hard as you can. But you still need to exercise patience in the long term.
Hustling hard for one week isn’t enough, you need to have the patience and discipline to push for the next year or more.
SEO is a long game, and with established brands moving into less competitive SERP’s it’s likely only going to get harder.
To be successful at SEO, you need to be able to commit to a long term plan but also work hard each day.
Use social media
SEO’s can often seem allergic to social media. They’d rather spend their time outreaching to new websites or influencers.
Social media is used by billions of people and ignoring it will cause you to be less efficient.
There are tens of thousands of companies out there who rank for extremely competitive keywords because they leveraged social media.
When you gain popularity on a social platform you’ll find that big magazines write about your posts, followers will share it on their own blogs and small websites will comment on your brand.
Social media should be part of any good SEO strategy. It’s an easy way to score a few passive backlinks and to interact with your community.
Conclusion
Gary Vaynerchuk has inspired the next generation of entrepreneurs. Hopefully, some of them go on to be involved in SEO.
The SEO industry has been insular for far too long. It’s time to look outside of optimizing keywords and explore a broader marketing strategy.
Everything that your brand does will feed back into your SEO. Don’t be afraid to interact in the real world every so often or to use social media to grow your brand.