Copy With Taste

I keep a note on my phone with ideas for this blog.

Copy with Taste is what I’m going with today.

If you haven’t read Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, this post includes my favourite bits.

At some point, we all struggle to come up with ideas for content, ideas for marketing campaigns, ideas for our business. Whatever that is.

Steal Like an Artist gives you permission to find ideas from everywhere and then do something with them.

Collect Good Ideas

Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas, the more you have to choose from to copy.

Save them somewhere.

In a notebook or in the notes app on your phone like I do. Just dump them in.

“Save your thefts for later.”

The reason we’re doing this is we actually learn by copying. Copying is like practice.

Now just because you’ve stolen saved someone’s idea or work, you don’t get to pass this work off as your own. That’s plagiarism. There’s a difference.

With AI, it’s also becoming easier and easier to spot the good ideas, the good marketing campaigns and the good marketing strategies. Because the terrible ones are clearly 100% AI with zero thinking or editing having been applied.

The Not-So-Secret Formula

I love simple ideas like this. Simple, yes. Easy? Not so much.

“Do good work and share it with people.”

It’s so stupidly simple, you almost won’t believe it.

Step 1. Do good work.

Step 2. Share it with people.

People and the internet filter the good from the bad, and if you’re putting in the effort to do Step 1, it will naturally surface to the top and be shared over and over.

Choose What to Leave Out

Last tip from the book that I love is, choose what to leave out.

Reducing and deleting words is the first thing I do after writing. Especially useful when you’ve used AI to help you write something.

As a great example, “really” is a word that you can almost always drop from your sentence, and it will make your sentence stronger.

Go forth and steal copy some ideas!

Jason Bagley Founder, Growth Experts

I'm a business builder, the founder of Growth Experts, sometimes public speaker, and a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Mostly though, I’m just a dad to Eva & Cruz and a husband to Karina.