It happens easily enough.
You’re searching online for ideas, checking out your competition, and just getting a sense of your industry’s best practices. You stumble across a website that just lights you up. It speaks to you in a way most don’t.
You’re transfixed. Pretty soon you’re reading through every page of the archives and putting together a picture in your mind about how they run their business and why it’s so successful.
OR
You’re watching what your peers are doing. You’re spending too much time looking at sales pages, web copy and blog posts for people doing what you do – they may be your friends, your mentors or those a-listers in the internet sphere. Either way, you’re spending more time than you’d like to acknowledge watching, listening and reading everything they produce.
And then the inevitable happens.
You start to copy them.
It can be a subtle copy or blatant cut and paste. It can happen unconsciously or deliberately.
Either way – it’s not pretty.
And it seems to be on the rise. So I’m calling it out today.
When you copy someone’s work, their language, their style – you are copying a piece of their brand. That unique brand that makes them – them.
If you’ve had your stuff modeled/copied/stolen (whatever word you want to use) you know what it feels like, right? Like a piece of you has been taken.
As any successful business owner will tell you, everything they do is carefully thought out and strategized. It’s not just, “hmm let’s throw up a sales page on this today and see how it does.” This means that days, even weeks if not months are put into thinking through the strategy, the offer, the web copy and the positioning.
So when someone comes and just lifts it and uses it as their own, it minimizes the work and care that went into creating compelling content and branded design.
It’s just not cool.
Yet, we’ve all done it at some point. I sure have. And I look back now and *cringe*. Not only did I take someone else’s stuff (I never copied word for word, but I took pieces of the essence of their stuff), but deep down I KNEW that it was not me. That I was missing an opportunity to put my voice out into the world.
When you see something you love or something that seems to be working really well for someone else, it’s easy to want to just create your version of it and hope for the same results.
Except it doesn’t work that way.
You aren’t behind the curtain. You don’t know the ins and outs of why they did what they did, or what came before it, or what their big business vision is. You are not in their business. So what works for them, most likely, will not work the same for you.
And it does nothing to build your brand.
Great brands are an authentic, powerful expression of the person and what they believe and stand for. Great brands have done the hard work to get clear on their big message, who they serve and why it matters. Great brands have a unique voice and point of view that is infused throughout their website, their offers and their brand personality. It is unique to them.
This is what you want to create with your brand.
Playing devil’s advocate, I understand that there are only SO many ways to talk about something. And that there aren’t any new ideas out there. That’s true. Trying to come up with an entirely new lexicon to speak about your topic would be challenging to say the least. And there are only so many different offers a coach, for example, could make.
I don’t have a problem with getting inspired by other people’s stuff and using it to add flare and oomph to your brand. And I recognize that we often learn new and even better ways of doing things by watching others. That’s fine.
But what just gets me riled is to see people take ideas, strategies and even word-for-word language from other entrepreneurs and use it as their own.
To me it’s the difference between showing up at a party wearing the same pair of earrings as the ‘cool’ girl because you saw them on her last week and had to have them vs. showing up wearing the exact same outfit – same top, same pants, same handbag, same jewellery and same shoes (ick).
So if you’re guilty of the above (and again, we’ve ALL been there at one point), cop to it, and start focusing on building Brand You vs. a Me-Too brand. You have everything you need to do this inside you already – but every time you opt to use someone else’s stuff (no matter how subtly), you’re missing out on a great opportunity to step further into your own brand style, voice and point of view. And that has a direct impact on your bottom line.
Here are a couple of tips you can use if you struggle with modelling the success of others:
- Whenever you write something, be it a blog post, sales page or your About page, before you hit “publish,” re-read it and ask, “does this sound like me?” and “is this how I want my brand to come across?”
- When you go into writing/creation mode – shut down all the web pages, newsletters etc. of others. If you’re going back and forth between your page and theirs, it’s easy to inadvertently swipe copy
- Take a media break completely. Consider unsubscribing. Carve out some clear, quiet creation time JUST for you and your great ideas (yes, you have great ideas)
- If writing trips you up, consider recording your posts etc. and then transcribing them. It’s often easier to talk as ourselves than to write as ourselves.
- Get someone you trust to review your stuff before you have it go live. Ask them to tell you if it doesn’t sound like ‘you’.
- Remember, your brand’s essence, voice & style isn’t something you have to go out there and find. You already have it – it’s just about claiming it and stepping into it. So no need to look to others to find yours.
As you uncover and step into more of your own unique brand, you’ll notice that you’re less and less likely to look to others, and more and more able to just reach within and pull out your own greatness.
It takes practice, determination and a desire to find your own authentic business voice – the voice that sounds like no one but you. But it’s SO worth it.
