Short but critical post today.
I hope you’re having a profitable week. The latest whirlwind of rate cuts and announcements has certainly kept this industry interesting to say the least! With so much activity taking place around you, it can be easy to forget just what it takes to be successful.
There is 1 tool that I have kept in my arsenal that has come to my rescue time and time again. I strongly urge you to create one of these yourself if you haven’t already. It’s called a “swipe file.” A swipe file is simply a collection of the best advertisements that have managed to grab your attention.
Even the highest paid copywriters in the world (One in particular earning over $600,00.00 per month) currently use and recommend the use of a swipe file. This collection of great ads can help stimulate your own creativity when you cannot seem to get the ball rolling.
My personal collection is now at over 500 pages, and it’s a god-send when I just cannot seem to find the right angle. We all need outside influence to draw from. It helps to learn from ads that were successful in grabbing your attention, and to pick up on interesting perspectives, stories, layouts and more.
Perhaps a great slogan or headline caught your attention? The use of images were spot on… Any number of elements can help you to ponder your own market positioning, and potentially improve it. In short, I suppose today’s post could be summed up like this: “Perhaps your junk mail is not always junk!”
Chad Weber – www.loanofficermarketinglab.com
Good idea, I think (legal) imitation is flattery, after all…I look at The Quotations Page online all the time for inspiration. I also check out billboards, one of these days I’ll do a version of those Corona ads for some mortgage product
And I keep a personal web site just for screwing around with widgets and designing funny ads. And writing — it’s private, no MySpace confessions or naked pics here….
Inspiration is key to any type of success. Building a repository of good ideas and things that have moved you to action is smart.
How do you keep a swipe file of all time great blog posts?
I am sure Todd has an idea or two. Delicious.com maybe?
For me, I find that I better relate to printed material as opposed to staring a a PC screen. Just a weird quirk of mine.
When I find a great blog post, I print it out to place in my “Think Tank” folder. It works for me, and also assures that only the highest quality of material ends up in this folder, since I hate having a bunch of papers floating around.
Chad Weber – http://www.loanofficermarketinglab.com
This is nice blog,Observing today’s marketing strategies we have to find new steps for marketing.for that we can analyses our competitors blogs from that we have to think new ideas and put those ideas into Swipe files.With these swipe file we can recall the data.