Never run out of ideas again (just keep a Swipe File)

Today’s article is written by guest author Corey Haines, founder of SwipeFiles.co.

Steve Jobs once said “good artists copy, great artists steal.”

And before that, Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

See the pattern? Everyone who publishes is standing on the shoulders of giants, and the more shoulders you have to stand on, the farther you can see.

Everyone who publishes content – newsletters, blogs, tweets, whatever – can benefit from keeping a swipe file. A swipe file is a collection of marketing and copywriting examples to use for inspiration.

With a swipe file, you’ll never run out of ideas again.

Don’t have one yet?

I’ll show you exactly how to build the most valuable resource you’ll have in your career.

How to Make a Swipe File

The first step is to get the right SOURCES of inspiration for your swipe file.

Anytime you come across something that leaves an impression on you, whether it’s a:

Landing page
Blog post
Website
Advertisement
Sales letter
Email

…save it to review in the future. In just weeks, you’ll have a library of killer material to emulate.

This will make your job 10x easier when you have to create a new piece of content.

Pay attention to what grabs your attention.

Every time:

An ad makes you click
An email makes you buy
A headline makes you read
A tweet makes you retweet

Add it to your swipe file.

Some people say don’t pay attention to your competitors.

I call B.S.

You should pay attention to what works and doesn’t work for your competitors.

Learn from them, but don’t copy them.

Set up Google Alerts for news about them
Sign up for their email lists
Follow their social accounts
Go through their funnels

You should also be studying other companies in your industry to pick out their best strategies.

Google the top 100 companies in your industry
Go through their checkout flow
Click through their retargeting ads
Screenshot their popups

Swipe These Resources

Here are some sites with tons of great marketing examples:

Here are some sites for email inspiration:

Here are some sites for ad inspiration:

Here are some sites for video inspiration:

Here are some sites for landing page inspiration:

Here are some sites for onboarding inspiration:

Here is a site for text/SMS inspiration:

fantastictexts.com

Spend twenty minutes cruising through those websites, and copy/paste what you like into your own swipe file.

How do you make a swipe file?

These are the best 3 methods I’ve found to build a swipe file you’ll actually use:

Notion
Native platform bookmarks and labels
SwipeWell

Let’s take a look at each one.

Notion

You can make Notion as simple or as sophisticated as you’d like. I opt for simplicity.

First, create a table and name it something like “Swipe File.”

Drag in the media assets you want to add.

Install the Web Clipper browser extension to add links, text, and pages you want to save.

Now, you don’t need or even want a lot of columns. My suggestion is to only add one additional column for tags. Here, you can go crazy and add all the tags you want for each item you swipe. Too many filtering mechanisms and you end up not wanting to do any filtering.

You can also create a “Gallery” view that makes each item a card for more visual reference.

Notion also has a mobile app that allows you to quickly save items just like with the chrome extension.

If you want to save emails to Notion, there’s a handy Gmail add-on called “Save to Notion” you can find in the Google Workspace Marketplace.

Native platform bookmarks and labels

If you’re not keen on keeping a swipe file in just one place, you can leverage the native bookmarking and labeling features of most platforms.

I’ll show you a few.

In Gmail, any email that you receive can be tagged with labels like “swipe file” or additionally “ad,” “email,” “landing page” etc.

In Twitter, you can bookmark tweets, or if you’re a Twitter Blue subscriber, you can even create a bookmark folder called “Swipe File” for a dedicated Twitter swipe file.

In Instagram, you can save posts to a collection.

SwipeWell

SwipeWell has a one-click chrome extension that allows you to take a screenshot of any website and then title, tag, and annotate right from the extension.