Staying Paid

3 Tips To Build a Great Swipe File For Your Business

Posted on February 19th, 2008 in Business, Creation Station, General, Marketing

I broke down and bought a scanner/print/copy combo, the cheap kind that you don’t expect a lot out of. In my case, this was the Lexmark X2500m, priced at fifty bucks at your local Wally World. Since I’m in the middle of setting up my home network, I just figured that I shouldn’t break the bank just getting started. So this printer-scanner-copier combo actually prints and scans really nice. I used that machine to build my swipe file, which is still growing.

What Is a Swipe File?

A swipe file is a collection of great titles, headlines, points and other “memorables” that you can keep for reference when you need to come up with great ideas for your business projects. Generally swipe files are used by marketers when it’s time to draft the inevitable salesletter, or to come up with ideas for a blog :)

It takes time to build a great swipe file — don’t expect to have this done in a day. I’m converting my paper swipe file to a completely digital solution as part of my “Creation Station” project.

Step One: Find Your Mission

I have lots of things I want to explore online — my interest is primarily business/finance, with a healthy dose of fashion thrown in (if you don’t think fashion is worth your time as an affiliate, ask a random female you meet about how many shoes, pants, and belts she has in her closet!) — if I can’t access that information at a glance, then it’s not worth the time.

Since I know generally what type of advertisements I’m going to “swipe”, I can go into my computer and create a nice folder structure. I create a folder called “Swipe File”, which inside has folders called “Business”, “Finance”, and “Fashion”. As I go along in this project, I may feel the need to divide further, but any subdivisions would be inside these main categories.

Step Two: Know Thy Sources!

Magazines, online e-zines, salesletters — in the course of building your swipe file, all these sources are fair game. You can clip and collect these headlines and ads for your own collection — just remember not to actually copy the material. I suggest that you use your swipe file like I do — as a great base for some great ideas in your head.

I comb the web and look at what other marketers are doing that really compels me to buy from them. Take for example Alexis Dawes’s book, Desperate Buyers Only. Read that salesletter and tell me that you weren’t nodding your head at some of what was said. That’s what I thought. Ms. Alexis is definitely in my swipe file — along with her web site.

To boil it down to a point, your swipe file should include things that inspire you. What started my dream of becoming a marketer in the first place was the “Billion Dollar Letter” — the infamous letter that the Wall Street Journal used for almost 30 years and generated an estimated $2 billion dollars over that time period.

Step Three: Cry Havoc and Release The Dogs of SCAN!

The flatbed scanner part of your scanner should be pretty easy to use — on the X2500m, once it’s set up, you can use the Windows Scanner & Camera wizard to scan and save them. You also might want to check your combo machine’s bundle — each all-in-one manufacturer has their own software that you can use to scan the newspaper and magazine clippings and save to one default location. One thing that I don’t like about the Scanner & Camera wizard is that if you aren’t careful, it’ll save everything into a separate “filename” folder. For instance, if you scanned in an ad for a blackberry and named it blackberry, it would go into a folder named “blackberry” that contains a creativity named file called blackberry. Not really what you want under this system.

Once you scan in all the ads you want, you’re all set. Keep your swipe file on hand when you run out of juice during your brainstorming session. A little bit of work in the beginning can lead to some great rewards when you’re down in the trenches!