#GaryVeeEffect and getting 500 views on Medium

A couple days ago, Gary Vaynerchuk retweeted my post on twitter. Here’s what happened and how I got 500 views on my post with just one engagement in a day.

A bout a week ago, Gary Vaynerchuk released his book #AskGaryVee that is now #1 on Marketing for Small Business in Amazon. Two days before the release, Gary hosted a contest on Instagram and asked his followers to buy 3 books from amazon and email him the receipts. I texted my buddy right away and told him that this is a great opportunity for us since I’ll be buying the books anyway. I ended up buying a kindle version, an audible version and a hard copy for my buddy then emailed him the receipts and now we wait patiently ( summer, he said ).

March 7, 2016 6:55 PM— Tweeted at @garyvee asking him if the kindle version is coming out right at 12 am est. He replies @garyvee: “hope so”

March 8, 2016 1:41 AM — The book drops and I wake up in the middle of my sleep because I remembered that the book should be here. I opened up my phone and tried to refresh my kindle app to see if it’s finally downloaded. It isn’t so I hit refresh a couple more times. Maybe the servers are backed up. I go to amazon.ca and to my demise I see this:

March 8, 2016 1:51 AM — I just wanna read the first paragraph and be happy that I have the book before everyone else. Tomorrow is going to be dreadful waiting for 8 pm just so I can read it. Ugh.

March 9, 2016 6:45 AM — YES! Kindle automatically downloaded it in my sleep. Time to download the Audible version. My plans for the day were to read the book for a chapter and then listen to the audiobook for each chapter.

The Test

One week passed and 7 chapters after and I’m feeling like I have the Pandora’s Box in winning in the world of Social Media and in life. I feel like I just took Bradley Cooper’s NZT pill from Limitless.

One weekend after hustling on some startup work, photoshoots for the blog and some mobile developing, I decided to give everything I learned a try. Our social media presence for our blog isn’t doing that well. We had 500 followers with 0 engagement from doing the quick-easy scheme of following people and unfollow those people who don’t follow back. Rinse and repeat. Of course at some point, we’ll have 500 bots and zombies who don’t understand our blog and wasn’t even close to our niche. Dumb move.

Lesson 1:Anything worth doing takes years, just ask Jon Westenberg

Opened up my laptop, sat down on my desk, put my earphones on and I just zoned out. First I searched for #fashion. Ugh, that stream was way too broad with too many business ads trying to sell their latest shirt design. How about #fashionblogger? Bingo! Bloggers upon bloggers trying to get more followers by tweeting their blog out. Click, click, click. I went through the stream, read their blog, found out their interests and replied to them. Here’s a snippet of what I did during that time span:

I’m shocked. People are following back, people are replying, people are retweeting and people are engaging! What is going on? Is this real life? Wow, was this actually working?

The follower climb was a bit slow but they were actually engaging with me. I wonder if they’ll like a post if I hit them with a right hook:

3 retweets and 4 favourites. That was jab, jab, jab, right hook in action. I did this a little bit more over the weekend and tracked how well I was doing. By Monday, I looked at my twitter analytics and saw the 2.5k% increase in tweet impressions and 1k% increase in profile views.

I was really on to something here and I knew I had to tell people that the tactic in the book works. People watch Gary all the time but knowing that the work you put in it produces results is something else. So I wrote this piece:

Lesson 2: Build it and they will come is a joke. Validate your startup with advice from Mitch Robinson

I wrote it, put it out in the medium world and everyone will just find it somehow through his stream of medium posts, right? Wrong. I had 3 views for the first 2 hours and ended up to 5 views in 2 more hours.

A little bit of panic but it’s okay. Okay, going back to the book — use facebook and twitter to promote your blog post. Sure. I posted it on my facebook and tagged Gary Vaynerchuk. Begged my sister and my girlfriend to share the post — as it might help other people that they know. Posted it on twitter with #askgaryvee and tagged @garyvee. Nothing happened. He didn’t reply. He was probably in the plane heading back from Sydney. Begged my sister and my girlfriend again to retweet and share it and by the end of the day I had 15 views. Great. 15 is good but 15 is not good enough.

I right hooked without jabbing first and I missed. It really doesn’t matter how many twitter followers you have or facebook friends, if you’ve never engaged with them, they won’t care about anything you put out in the world. That’s just the reality of it.

Lesson 3: The harder I worked, the luckier I got. One of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rule in life

I guess you can call this the tactic that led to this:

and this:

and this:

Dragged myself out of bed on Tuesday, kissed my girlfriend goodbye and left the house to go to work. I went to check my stats on medium and saw that I was stuck on 15 views. Look at the bright side, aleast it’s 80% read rate right? Looked through twitter and tried to figure out what Gary was up to and if DailyVee was coming out. It wasn’t so I just played a game of Hearthstone on my phone while listened to the audiobook in my commute. I was on chapter 18, Gary Vee’s Guide to Public Speaking without shitting your pants. Got to my desk at work and started doing some developing. Bug. Bug. Bug. Bug. Bug. How am I getting paid to do this? Anyway, went to twitter again and saw Gary tweeting back and engaging with his followers.

I tweeted at him the first time and he never replied. Here’s my chance! He replied to me before but this time, maybe he’ll see my post if I tweet about it today! Maybe he’ll just reply and say, it’s awesome, get a couple more reads, bump it up to 30 and well, the end and write another piece.

I set it up and made sure there’s a big display picture so people see it ( I use twitshot here by the way ) and tweeted it.

I sat silently in my desk and hoped to God he replies. 1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds………Then this happened:

So I guess this was the right reaction to that:

#GaryVeeEffect

Within seconds, my tweet was getting retweeted and favourited with no sign of stopping it. I was refreshing my browser every second and checking my stats on medium to see how far this will go. 30 views, and then 40 and then 50… is this not going to stop?… 60.. 70.. woah 80?! 90?! 100?! WOAH.

I was in my desk holding myself back from screaming out loud! I was basically shaking while hastily typing out replies to everyone who tweeted back at me. I was getting views after views after views and recommends from #Vaynernation. I was getting tweets and retweets and people really appreciated the results from putting the book in action. Some people just consume information without putting it into action and when you see someone else actually do it, it empowers you to try and do the same. If it worked for me, I’m sure it’ll work for you as well.

The book also taught me that if you’re lucky enough to get a shot and be a part of something like this, you have to keep engaging with your community and the community who decided to put you in your spot. #Vaynernation did a whole lot of retweeting, liking and recommending. When you get in this spot, you don’t bask in it and do nothing. You finally get a foot in the door and you get a very tiny sliver of chance to engage back with the community. That’s what I did. Replied to every tweet, favourited every tweet and followed people who followed me and it was really good engagement.

Gary does this way better than I do and he probably get 10x more engagement than I do on a daily basis. The followers were piling up, the retweets, recommends, the favourites and the replies. I really tried to thank all of you for reading, retweeting and recommending. If I missed any of you please tweet me and I’d love to thank you and talk about the value that you got from my small post

The Aftermath

A couple hours after I got an email from John Marshall to have my post in their publication at ART + marketing.

As of writing this, I eclipsed 500 views with 402 reads and 29 recommends.

I’ve also gained about 33 followers on twitter, talked to about 15 of them, a collaboration piece with one of them and had a very small scale rupture within my network.

I’ve connected with people whom I never knew I’d be able to and actually provide value the way I never knew I could. Most of all, I learned that the book works. The motivation, the values — the clouds and the hardwork, the tactics — the dirt, they all work.

Key takeaways from this experience:

• Doesn’t take a day to build Rome.
• The harder you work, the luckier you get.
• If you build or write or post a youtube video, they will not just come. You need to engage with people.
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Jab, Jab, Jab and then a really big right hook.

If you still haven’t bought the book and you’re still sceptical, leave a comment or tweet me at @madfresco and hashtag #GaryVeeEffect and I might send you a copy of an audiobook!

To Gary Vaynerchuk,

Thank you for the experience and thank you for the book, it really is life changing.

If you liked this and I know you did, hit that green recommend button! 9 mins read and you got all the way down here, might as well right? ;)

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