When you have a product or course online it seems it's easy for competitors to copy it.
Yet, being in online marketing isn't the only place things can be copied. The fashion industry, for one has people that can copy. Competitors can copy whatever they feel like, because there's no law that prevents them from doing so.
So whether you have an offline business or online, you'll want to stay ahead of the competition.
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Ever since I was a kid, I always liked to draw.
I'd sit in the corner and I'd draw. I wouldn't speak much to people, but I'd draw. As you can imagine, I got very, very good at drawing, but I wouldn't sign my work.
I wouldn't put my name on the work, and my mother would always tell me, “Sean, you have to sign your work. People will copy it. They'll copy it and they'll claim it as their work.”
Now when I was 10, I didn't see the irony of it, that the reason that I could draw in the first place was because I was copying stuff. As human beings, that's what we do. We learn to copy; we learn to trace. The more we can copy and the more we can trace, the better we become at any skill.
The problem arises when we grow up and we start to write books
We start to do other things like paintings and then other people start to copy us. Suddenly, when you look out there in the marketplace, there seem to be people there ripping you off and you don't know how to stop it, but there is a way to stop it.
The wrong way to stop it is to go after them. The wrong way to stop it is to get so upset, so angry that you want to destroy that competitor. This takes up all your energy. All that frustration comes to the fore and it's completely useless because the other person will continue to copy.
How do we stop them? We stop them with our own ingenuity.
There are 3 ways that you can actually slow down your competition.
How do you slow them down? You can never stop them. You slow them down with:
- Updates
- Branding
- Your Personality
It doesn't take a lot of effort to do this, so how do we go about it?
Let's start off with the first one, which is updates.
Yesterday, while I was on my walk I was listening to a TED talk, and this TED talk was by Johanna Blakley. She was talking about the fashion industry and how in the fashion industry it is routine to just copy other people's stuff. You don't even have to think about it; you just copy it.
She talked about a shoe designer, and this shoe designer's name is Stu Weitzman. He was very frustrated because he would design these amazing shoes and people would go out there and copy it, and there were no laws to stop them from copying it. Johanna goes on; she went on to describe how Stu upped his game.
What he started to do was create these Bowden-Wedged shoes. It was very difficult to copy them because they were made of titanium, and if you didn't' make them of titanium, they would crack.
What he did was create an update that was almost too difficult to copy.
You're probably not making shoes. You probably have a consulting service. Maybe you have a book or a product, you sell information and there your competitors are copying you. How do we deal with this?
Let me tell you the issues that we have at Psychotactics. You can have copying where someone just copies your stuff, kind of similar, and then there are other issues like where they rip off your stuff. If you look at several courses that we have, we have the article writing course, the copywriting course, the uniqueness course.
We've been going since 2002. I guess we're reasonably popular on the Internet because if you look at some of the sites where they pirate stuff, where they resell other people's stuff, well, that's exactly what's happening to us. There are these pirates that take our stuff just like they do with Microsoft Word and Photoshop and then they resell it and they make money off it. We can get angry; we can start chasing them down. There are websites that do just this, and it's a complete waste of time.
The way to beat this system is to create updates.
When we do an article writing course, we change about 20% of the course. If you did an article writing course live with us, not through some pirate, you would find that it has changed 20% since last time. It has got more efficient, it has got better. If you bought the course off some pirate, you're probably struggling 20% or 40% or 60% more.
Yes, you're getting the information probably cheaper, but the problem is that the updates are so powerful that it is very, very difficult for them to keep up. Now they may buy the original product, but as long as we keep updating it, as long as we keep refining it, it becomes extremely difficult to copy.
If you look at our book The Brain Audit, it started out at Brain Audit Version 1 and then went to Version 2 and Version 3 and Version 3.2, and it has stayed there.
Now what if your book just stays there? What you've got are updates.
What we've done is we've had updates on target profile and we've had updates on uniqueness. The book is changing about 10 to 20%, but internally. If you're on our list and if you bought it from us, that's where you get all the information from, but if you don't, you don't. This is how you stay ahead of both your competitors and your pirates. You keep updating. Change 15%, change 20%, and they'll never, ever catch up.
Now this takes us to the second part, which is the concept of branding
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