Gary Vaynerchuk is a self-taught wine expert, social media guru and serial entrepreneur who has developed an enormous online following with his business commentary and unique personal brand. In the process of transforming his family’s local liquor store into a one of the wine industry’s leading players, Vaynerchuk launched his Wine Library daily webcast that regularly attracts over 90,000 viewers. He has the honour of being one of the few individuals to have maxed-out their Facebook friends limit, is amongst top 100 most followed on Twitter, delivers keynote speeches at the industry’s most important conferences and provides social media consultancy to some of the world’s biggest brands.

Established as a pioneer of social marketing and online community management, Vaynerchuk revealed his secrets to unlocking earning potential in his 2009 New York Times bestseller Crush It! His latest book, The Thank You Economy, espouses a return to old-school values in business relations, and, in the style that characterises all of his output, engages the reader with natural enthusiasm, down-to-earth language and truly refreshing ideas.

The Book

The Thank You Economy is a 256-page read that explores how social media has revolutionised businesses’ relationships and responsibilities to their customers, and how business owners and entrepreneurs can step into and develop rewarding social media conversations. Put simply, the main thrust of Vaynerchuk’s text is that politeness and understanding are crucial to businesses using social media, not just for the sake of good manners – which of course are important in all human relationships – but also because of the huge ROI there is in saying ‘thank you.’

The opening chapter outlines a brief history of business-customer relationships in recent times. Vaynerchuk explains how our grandparents and great-grandparents lived in a world of close communities in villages, small towns and city neighbourhoods. Businesses owners – ‘Bob the Butcher is Vaynerchuk’s example – served these communities and were known personally to their customers. Word-of-mouth was crucial – if Bob the Butcher sold someone a dodgy sausage the news would quickly spread and damage Bob’s sales. The later half of the 20th Century saw an increase in big businesses, car ownership and out-of-town supermarkets. Bob the Butcher was sidelined out of business.

As the small-town mentality of our grandparents was replaced by individualism, communities fragmented, people became more atomised, and big businesses were able to act as they pleased. Even with the intervention of the internet, the business-customer relationship remained a one-way conversation. All that changed around 2003 with the development of Web 2.0 and social media. Suddenly consumers have found their voice and formed meaningful communities again, can complain about bad businesses and sing the praises of those they like. People are able to quickly and widely recommend and share the companies they enjoy dealing with and warn about those they do not. For businesses social media has opened a huge potential for interacting with their customers, listening to what they want; saying ‘please, ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ when it counts, and reaping the rewards of these new relationships.

While Vaynerchuk’s concept of the small-town lives of our grandparents may be slightly rose-tinted, it does provide a very convincing parallel to how social media has enabled the return of the power of word-of-mouth. As he states, ‘at its core, social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners.’ Once you stop thinking about social media ‘as a tool for shutting customers up, and rather as a tool for encouraging customers to speak up, and for you to speak to them, a whole world of branding and marketing will unfold.’

Having introduced the idea and importance of The Thank You Economy, Vaynerchuk goes on to explain how to successfully put it into practice with solid case studies and intriguing anecdotes. As with his previous blockbuster Crush It!, this is an essential text for freelancers, entrepreneurs, digital marketing professionals and suit-wearing business types who plan to use social media to engage with clients and customers. Along with valuable lessons for anyone with a product or service to sell, the book is accessible, jargon-free and jam-packed with Vaynerchuk’s trademark enthusiasm and inspiring ideas.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Lessons for Freelancers

Ease of use: With a simple and intuitive layout, your website should be friendly, fast and easy to use. This will help establish trust.

Accessible: The text is written in your language – straightforward, easy-to-read with no jargon that can alienate users. Present all the essential information and more.

Meaningful:Do something useful, different, memorable, thoughtful, charitable. But make sure you do it for the right reason.

Common courtesy: Treat people who email you with a question with respect, friendliness and promptness. Treat them like you would like to be treated yourself.

Respect: Every person who sends an email should be treated with equally high respect. Even if their email is an irrelevant question, littered with misspellings and factual errors, you should still aim to respond with the utmost care and attention.

Friendliness: Show how much you genuinely care by finding the answer they need. Give them the correct information, all delivered in a friendly and upbeat tone of voice.

Promptness: Aim to respond to queries with the greatest possible promptness, ensuring you provide a reply within one day.

Leveraging Correspondences

When your users are taking the time to contact you for help, you can leverage the situation to grow your business by:

• Prompting them to friend you on Facebook.

• Sending them to a relevant blog post on your blog.

• Having a fully populated email footer with your personal contact details and links to social media profiles.

• Continuing the conversation from one channel to another. Take your detailed answer and, with the user’s permission, post it on your blog or share the answer with your Facebook friends.

• Avoiding trying to sell, sell, sell, all the day. This only puts people off!

David Boyd is the co-founder of the CreditCardCompare.com.au comparison website. Follow him on Twitter or read more of his writing on their blog.

This book is more than a self-study book. It is a workshop. I recently signed up for the blogging workshop at Super Work at Home Mom with Melinda Brennan. In the workshop, we work through the book and support each other throughout in the comments sections. Even in this book, Darren builds community while we work on our blogs and businesses.

If you are new to blogging (and even if you’ve been doing it awhile), there is something for everyone to learn. Over the 31 days, Darren gives specific steps and activities for you to do with your blog. The first day, for example, has you writing an elevator pitch for your blog. In each step Darren lists in the book, he guides readers through elements you business and blog needs effective communication with readers. Before starting this book, I didn’t have even half of these projects set up on my blog.

As I work through the book, I have noticed that my content communicates to readers better. As I gaze over my analytics I have set up for my blog, I noticed that more readers are reading my content for longer periods. After learning about interlinking posts on day eight, I suppose that contributed to this goal.

Darren lists several ways that you can tie in social media with your blog. His expertise on joining a forum and offering advice is essential to getting people to read your blog for your business. It makes sense. Instead of asking questions and being the one in need, you offer the solution for people who have questions. When I did this on a major forum in my niche, the woman who I helped added me as a friend. I imagine she goes to my website and reads my blog now. I have the links in the forum. She thanked me for the advice.

Remember that in business, people will remember that you help them with a problem and/or introduced them to a solution. My friend, Anna (a Beach Body coach) recently commented about a lady that she talked to almost a year ago, finally got in touch with her and ordered products from her. She had apologized for taking so long, but decided to order from her based on advice Anna gave a year before. It might take time to build customers based on advice, but putting your knowledge out there works.

Darren packs value into this book for building your blog. I have read plenty of books about blogging from the local library. Some simply theorize how you should grow readership. Others list activities, but none have been as in-depth as these listed in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. With the popularity of the book, Darren’s site has many people responding to the activities. That’s why I suggest signing up for a workshop like Melinda’s. It’s a smaller community of people who get together and work on their blogs.

This book builds community around your blog and helps you focus your efforts on servicing your readers. That’s how Darren built his blog. It’s how he helps you build yours and it works. Try the book and see in 31 days how your readership grows.

Tell us about your experiences in the comments section and how this book helps your freelance business and blog.

*Image credit from Problogger

by Jeannine Clontz and Lauren Hidden

This book has been around for a while—it was first published in 2006—but the information is all still relevant. Jeannine Clontz is a respected businesswoman who served as President of the International Virtual Assistants Association and Lauren Hidden has owned her own virtual editorial services business for over ten years, so these are authors who know the world of which they speak, and as such, are able to offer advice and guidance in areas not always explored by other “How-To Freelance”-type books. Sure, you’ll find more typical discussions of topics such as how to decide if this is the career for you and the financial investment you’ll need to start up your business, but what made me a fan were the more “experience based” topics like how to get rid of clients or turn down jobs. As someone who has gained a reputation as an expert in the area through speaking engagements and writing Clontz, especially, understands the topic of business ethics through and through. What types of jobs are you not willing to do? How far will you go for a buck? Again, not your typical how-to fare, but in a business in which the projects and jobs we take on are all a result of our choices, these are decisions we’re all going to have to examine.

Another invaluable part of this book is the resources referenced and given throughout. Not only are helpful Web sites and resources handed out like yummy candy in each chapter, there’s a whole section in the back on contracts. Not on what they are or how to implement them, though that’s all explained, too—no, what we have here are actual template contracts for subcontractor agreements, work for hire agreements, editorial retainer agreements, client retainer agreements, non-solicitation agreements, confidentially agreements, and even a business plan. These are great not only to show you how to do the contracts, but to teach you specifics of what you need to look for even if you DON’T go with a formal agreement.

Though I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a Virtual Assistant in the truest sense of the word, a lot of my projects aren’t strictly writing, so I’ve often thought about just calling myself a VA and embracing the bigger picture. I read Entrepreneurial Freedom: How to Start and Grow a Profitable Virtual Assistance Practice by Jeannine Clontz and Lauren Hidden in the hopes of trying to pinpoint exactly what being a Virtual Assistant entailed, but as it turned out, not only does the book encompass pretty much any type of freelancing work you might be doing, it makes an often misconstrued profession seem absolutely construed.

The Unlimited Freelancer is an excellent tool for anyone who is thinking about becoming a freelancer, just starting out or a seasoned professional who wants to take the next step to building a business. It incorporates the real stories of people who have built businesses and how they overcame their own obstacles so their businesses and freelancing careers could thrive. I could relate to many of the true stories the eBook referenced to and took away solutions for some of the problems I have faced while growing a business. This eBook provides encouragement to small business owners and the systems to put into place to allow them to achieve their business goals. The underlying theme is one of motivation for the freelancer to create a business that they will enjoy while giving the details on how to structure the new business to make this possible.

One example of the steps The Unlimited Freelancer outlines is systemization. Some of the frustration shared by many freelancers who operate a solo show is time management and prioritization. This eBook gives you the specific resources to use for automating, outsourcing and creating time. There are examples of multiple tools in the areas of task management, contact management, marketing and accounting that will streamline work flow and save massive amounts of time for any entrepreneur. Efficiency and productivity are the lessons to take away when considering new software and resources that will allow you to get more done. Multiple resources are provided so you can choose the best support product for your individual needs.

The author also gives you a detailed plan on how to leverage your business by team building and outsourcing. The direction is concise on how to build a distributed team by hiring other freelancers, virtual assistants, and other contractors to assist you and allow you to focus on growth. One poignant remark that sums up these references is “Successful people have support teams”.

The Unlimited Freelancer is a step by step manual on how to grow your business with the correct tools to be efficient and effective. It also gives you a multitude of samples and directions on how to put provisions into place to reach your business growth goals realistically. There is an excellent section on creating passive income by utilizing revenue-generating assets to provide additional income. The eBook provides samples with the pros and cons of each idea of products that can be built an executed. The eBook walks you through how to develop, market and put the asset into active sales from start to finish on.

This guide will take you from discovering the work you were born to do, developing goals and objectives, to expand the business you desire. All the steps in between, from targeting your market, recruiting and hiring help, and understanding all of the roles you’ll have to play as business owner. It is all clearly described and defined for you in this eBook. The eBook is concluded with a comprehensive and inspiring overview of what is needed to become a successful business owner. It has been helpful for gaining a more complete understanding of the entrepreneurial process and how to set down a solid foundation for success.

The business world has drastically changed in the last few years. The Unlimited Freelancer shows how to develop the exact tools and abilities to survive in the new marketplace. The advice is solid as the topics are relevant in business today. This eBook is going to be a hit with small business owners and freelancers everywhere. The guide offers a great deal of information that you can actually and immediately use in your business endeavors. It is well-written, but more important, it is a good read. Everyone will benefit from the in-depth analysis of what works in a variety of existing business situations. I thought I was getting an eBook which would later collect dust on the book shelf, but I’ve decided instead to get a copy for my partners and friends, and to keep it at my desk to refer to again and again. Anybody thinking about starting a business or is currently a business owner will benefit greatly from the experiences Mason and James share in this eBook.