Gary Vaynerchuk, otherwise known as Gary Vee, represents what any social media-obsessed and online-savvy business founder or hustler aspires to be.

He is a globally-known brand, super entrepreneur, omni-present online and off, and a charming mix of being loud-mouthed, kind-hearted, deeply-insightful, family-oriented, New York Jets-obsessed person, who also happens to have more than two million social media followers and 30 million video views on YouTube and Facebook. Add that to his actually building at least two businesses to eight or nine figures revenue and above, and being an investor in Twitter, Snapchat and Uber, Gary is indeed a force to be reckoned with and role model for many.

Are You A Gary Vee Fanatic?

For many that watch his videos or read his articles and posts, there is much, much more than just his trademark ‘hustle’ mantra and inspiration or aspiration to be like him. To be ‘like’ Gary, however, requires an understanding; firstly of how he thinks, and secondly modelling and taking massive action, like how he approaches his businesses. Gary understands and solves the problem that most start-ups and tech businesses face: building an online celebrity status that leads to an actual healthy business with revenues and profits.

How Hungry And How Strong Are The Followers, You May Ask?

Check out the bad reviews on Amazon for his books – followers pounce on them like rabid hyenas. When Gary announced a random last-minute meet-up in London, more than 500 people turned up within two hours’ notice. Now that’s massive loyalty. Much more than that, the loyalty translates to user downloads, engagement, wine and book sales, service agreements, and much more for Gary. And the primary driver of all of this is his online personal brand that he’s built over the last 10 years.

Logically, we would question whether there’s a limit to what an individual’s online brand can sell, right? If you look through Gary’s career, he’s used the brand he built to sell everything: from retail products, to services, from items with less than a $20 price tag, to six and seven-figure deals. We’ll go into that in a moment.

A reminder that this concept of building a strong, human, personal, attractive, brand in business is not new. In fact, a business branding mogul from a generation ago, who is still ubiquitous today for using his larger-than-life brand to sell everything from mineral water to space travel, Richard Branson, said that the cheapest and most effective way for a company owner to market their business was to use their personal brand. His antics with naked surfing, cross-dressing, desert-island living and channel swimming have indeed led to a wealthy life for him, both in experiences and material wealth.

But now, let’s go back to Gary. Let’s look at what he did, play by play:

1. Food Retail

Gary grew up in New Jersey, and his father built a wine business, Wine Library, over the course of more than a decade, to a $3 million-a-year business, when Gary started taking over marketing and business decisions. Beyond working shifts, selecting wines and placements in the shop, Gary decided to venture into something outside anything they did before.

He opened up his laptop and poured a glass of one of his wines and started reviewing it. That was the first episode of Wine Library TV. Gary did 1,000 episodes, and soon become known as ‘that YouTube wine guy’. In five years, he grew the business to $60 million sales a year.

2. Books: Seven-Figure Deal

Hot off the success of Wine Library TV, Gary started investing and building into other businesses. He got invited to several tech, business and marketing conferences where he quickly became known as one of the most energetic yet insightful speakers with his frank truth. That soon landed a deal with him and Harper books known to be seven figures in value, 10 books’ worth and, to date, four New York Times best sellers. Books included:

• Crush It! (2009)

• The Thank You Economy (2011)

• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook (2013)

• #AskGaryVee (2016)

One thing that stood out for Gary and his building his audience and interest was how he was always authentic with his engagements. He is known to randomly ask for phone numbers, and calling up his fans, winning them over for life. Throughout this process, he put out content on social media and engaged one-on-one and en-masse, launched his books and did book tours and signings, routinely selling the idea of the book and building its audience one year in advance each time. Along the way, Gary built his brand by having other celebrities on his show: people from Larry King of talk-show fame, to Lorie Greiner of QVC and Shark Tank-fame, to Fat Joe the rapper, Eric Thomas the street motivator, and marketing guru Seth Godin.

3. Driving Users On Platforms

Taking his now-immense knowledge on content marketing, branding, brand engagement, Gary took his skills and applied it in a number of businesses – specifically tech businesses that he invested in. Two of these that benefited from his direct evangelism are Twitter and Snapchat.

In Snapchat’s case, Gary is single-handedly responsible from bringing droves of hustlers, entrepreneurs and freelancers there with his exclusive content, and actually inspiring them to use it actively to build their own brands. He wrote numerous articles and mentioned it several times in his YouTube shows and in keynotes and conferences that Snapchat and real-time, raw, unedited video journalling would be the next big thing in social behaviour and business.

In this case, not only did Gary serve an investor, not only was he a smart-investor, but he was every start-up founders’ dream: a mentor-builder-investor who actually took it on his own to contribute to the business’ growth.

4. Professional Services

Today, Gary heads VaynerMedia, a new-age brand and marketing agency that boasts more than 500 employees, some of the biggest brands in the world as their clients, and more than $40 million revenue in 2014 alone. Beyond the scope of branding and marketing, he is taking his talents and influence into other spheres, such as athlete management, venture funding and more: everything fuelled by his meteoric rise in his brand, which is still rising.

Interestingly, another ‘side hustle’ that Gary created, which feeds further into his brand and businesses is an extremely profitable business of keynote speaking, said from sources who wish not to be named, at six figure-values every time he speaks. Not bad for a host of a YouTube show.

Hot on the heels of Gary’s footsteps are his tribe of followers: hustlers, start-up founders, marketers, and wannabe-entrepreneurs from all walks of life. Many, inspired by his actions, take their own action and provide testimony to his methods. Gary’s latest blogpost on his website talks of one of them using Snapchat to sell and close a luxury real estate deal (more than a seven-figure deal … on Snap!)

So it’s clear that regardless of your industry, online personal branding is here to stay, and cannot be ignored. Taking the lessons of Gary Vee’s Online Branding 101 course, here are the tips in condensed form:

• Understand your niche.
• Build content that is valuable and engage with your audience to understand their needs and give value first.
• Create products and services that have real value to your audience.
• Build a long-term, long-tail and deep-rooted brand that continues to sell long after you’ve filmed an episode or released an article.
• Cumulatively build your brand, deepening in a niche or cross-promoting into related niches.
• Consistency, consistency, consistency – turn up every single day, and have the resilience to last the marathon and out-run every other competitor.

The Most Important Single Takeaway Is This:

Regardless of your industry, if you want to Brand It Like Gary … you have to start putting your brand out there, giving value and educating your audience, and you have to start right now.

Building a strong online brand is the long-term and sustainable way to build your business (tech start-up or otherwise) and, as proven by Gary, one of the most long-term, non-hard-selling and authentic (yet fun) ways of doing so. Utilising Gary’s techniques will ensure that you’re watching and building the long-term business game, while also reaching for the low-hanging fruit.