How You Can “Biz Dev” on Reddit like Gary Vaynerchuk

WTF are “Hustle”, “Grind”, and “Biz Dev” anyway?

What should you do when your video only has, like, 5 views?

This week I wanted to write a bit of a simple article, but we’re really going to get down into the weeds of marketing. I want to demystify the concept of “business development”, especially as it’s being used in the online entrepreneur world today (by people like Gary Vaynerchuk).

Terms like “hustling”, “grinding”, and yes “biz dev” are thrown around all the time in hyped up overly motivational videos. But almost no time is spent defining what that means, or breaking down the real strategies (other than broad generalizations — “Get on Snapchat TODAY”).

I’ve already spent some time breaking down strategies for Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook — but today I want to have a broader conversation about what biz dev or hustling even IS, and show you one of my techniques for doing some biz dev on Reddit.

Biz dev is at its core, finding people to talk to about what you do.

In 2017, it’s about using the technology available to scale your 1-to-1 interactions and talk to many people about what you do.

Gary Vaynerchuk discusses his “biz dev” strategy for WineLibraryTV

“Build it and they will come” is not marketing advice.

The quality of your content is definitely the #1 factor in whether or not people will stick around, don’t get me wrong… No amount of hustling can spread spam (okay, maybe accidental PPC clicks).

You definitely want to create the most amazing content you can, and figure out how to deliver value to the audience you want to attract.

But would the most AMAZING video in the entire world even matter if that file never made it off your camera’s SD card? No.

Unless you get your content out in front of people the quality of the content doesn’t matter.

So the next time a guru is talking about “the hustle” or “the grind”, now you know what they’re talking about: spend time getting your content out in front of people.

So many people stay stuck in the creative cycle:

Thinking about new content ideas, starting 5, only half-finishing them, getting discouraged, going back to the drawing board — or just giving in and slapping something together, less concerned with the quality of the content than just getting it done.

But then they upload it to YouTube, or wherever the content lives, and that’s where it sits. The creator goes back into their cycle, ignoring their latest content for their next content.

And then 3 months, or 6 months later they’ll look up and wonder where all the views are?

Again, if you’re only getting 3 views, 5 views this is your problem.

Derek Halpern, an awesome digital marketer, breaks this down extremely well in his post here:

“The secret to building a blog with a raving fan base that’s ready to buy what you sell has nothing to do with how much content you create. It, instead, has to do with how good you are at getting your content into the hands of more people.”

I have written extensively about finding conversations to be part of here, and here, but today I wanted to share with you…