In most industries, the idea of copying and stealing another person’s work or ideas is seen as bad practice. In affiliate marketing, however, it’s a must.
Stealing and copying, in the world of affiliate marketing, do not mean taking another person’s campaign verbatim and posting it as your own. Instead, you should be constantly looking at other people’s strategies in order to find out what works and what doesn’t. Then you need to decide whether you want to copy or steal their work.
Copying can be defined as looking at another affiliate’s campaign and trying to come up with a similar idea, whilst still remaining fairly original. Copying another person’s work word for word will probably lead to you either being caught, or losing the trust of your client base. It can also land you in hot water over legal rights to the content. Therefore, we strongly advise against this practice. What’s more, your content will lack any originality or personal flavour and, as a result, will be far less likely to attract consumer attention.
Think of copying more as a means of following trends. If your competitor has success blogging about Nutra then you too could have success blogging about Nutra right? Not necessarily. First of all, it depends who your target audience is. Secondly, they may have a special insight in their work which they know works and which you don’t. Our advice is that copying is the poor man’s art, whilst stealing is the breakfast of champions. So what exactly do we mean by stealing?
Stealing is the art of taking someone else’s project which works and remodelling it to make it your own. It involves sticking far more closely to the original but, because it’s your work, you are legally entitled to call it your own.
Imagine an affiliate competitor, in the same market as you, produces a video for his product in which he interviews an ‘expert’. You could create exactly the same content in which you do exactly the same thing, asking similar questions, knowing that, if you have the same demographic, it will more than likely be successful. Stealing strategies in this way is not bad practice, it’s common sense and it could help you to drive up your profits exponentially.
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