Hello everybody, this is Scott Bradley coming to you from www.scottbradley.name and in this
Evernote Scott video today, it's going to be a very quick video and I'm going to cover exactly
how I set up my swipe file in my Evernote account. If you don't know what a swipe file is,
what it is in simple terms, is a space where you can go and reference if you're creating
marketing and you want to use your swipe file as inspiration. Let's say for instance, you're
creating a banner campaign and you wanted to look at other banner campaigns from other past
people, either inside your niche or outside of your nice, it's really, really valuable to have a
swipe file to go back to for inspiration for what you want to create.
So, in using Evernote, I've created a way and a structure that's going to work for you if you're a
marketer, if you're a business owner, if you manage a lot of the marketing for your company, if
you work for a normal corporation. This is going to be really valuable for you.
So, let's get started. What you want to do is you want to create a swipe file notebook stack. So
as you can see here the title of my stack is called 'swipe file' and then what I have done is put
the different media types as the subnotebooks. So just for illustration purposes, I have
'banners', 'book covers', 'Facebook ads', 'promoted Tweets' and 'websites'. Now, the only
reason why I limited this list mainly is because I know depending on your business you're
going to want to swipe different types of media. So you could put videos here, you could put
YouTube videos here, you could put sales pages, you could put capture pages but it is really
important that you have the title of the notebook stack as 'swipe file' and then every notebook
under it as the media type. And you're going to see why that's really important here in a
second but I want to make sure that you have the structure first.
So, as you start creating this think about, "Okay, what am I copying? What am I saving? And
then what kind of media type of media bucket does it fall under?" and then create those
notebooks for you.
So after you have done that, the next step is to then start filling your swipe file. Now if you're
anything like me, you probably have multiple screen shots every which way on your computer
in multiple folders that's a big mess and there's no sense of organization. And when you go
and actually jump into your swipe file you probably just get so overwhelmed that it is just a big
frustrating mess. When you have to either write an email, you need to write a sales page, you
need to write a capture page, you need to create a post card, you need to write a letter. It's not
an organized symbiotic way of going back to your swipe file to know what you need to create.
So I have that solved that problem using Evernote and have created a structure that works best
for you. So, I'm going to start with the banners and then I'm going to show you how tags are
able to make it so easy organize and reference later as you go back to it. So, the structure that
you want to follow is obviously, notebook stack is swipe file, the notebook that you select is the
media type and then each note within the media type. So, let's just say for banners, what you
want to do is in the title of the note you want to put the name of the person of whose ad it is and
the company name as well.
Now, as you can see here, there's two types of notes that are going to fall into the banner's
category. More likely, if it's a big corporation, like a Staples, which I'm going to show you
here in a second, you would only put the company name. But let's say for instance, you're in
the real estate niche and the real estate, realtor niche and you're following other agents and
your competitors and you want to spy on their online banners that they're using. You would
ideally put name of person, let's just say, Ryan Smith and then the company name would be
Coldwell Banker or Remax or whatever or whatever real estate company that is who you are
representing.
So in each of these notes you're going to want to put your screen shot of your picture of your
banner here and then what I typically do is I put in a couple notes of what I liked best about it.
So I liked the color, I like the layout, I like how they promoted it on xyz.com website on the top
right or the bottom or the top leaderboard banner, whatever it is.
Now after you have done that, here's where the magic happens from a management and going
back to it standpoint. So let's just visualize that we're going to have thousands of different
notes from company persons and people and different banners and different creatives, and let's
just say you have thousands of notes. Obviously, if you were to go back to this banner's
notebook, you be like, "Oh my gosh? What the heck? How do I find the one from Ryan and his
company this? And this? I want to just see those banners within his scope?" Well that's where
the power of tagging comes in.
So the way you want to structure your tags in simple terms is the very first thing you want to is,
I'm going down here, you're going to see the list of tags that I started to build. Is you want to
first create a tag titled 'Swipe A File'. Now the reason why I have A, B and C here is just for
organizational purposes because of the way that the Evernote web based version structures and
alphabetizes this but I know that on the desktop you can structure it any way that you want and
move things up and down. But, again, just for illustration purposes to make it clear in your
mind, I'm just showing you the step by step here in the structure that's going to keep it so easy
to understand.
So the very first thing that you want to do is first have a tag, no matter what, called 'Swipe A
File'. Now if you remember in past videos, I used another prefix called, 'peeps' and this was
for my people pad and my people conversation. So, again, if you can imagine, you're going to
have hundreds of tags here and you're going to know exactly which ones are my swipe file tags,
which one are my contact tags, which one are my people tags. So that's why I have the first
swipe in capital SWIPE and then File. So you want to make sure you have that one first.
Then the next modality of tags that you want to be creating are the media types. So have Swipe
B Banner, Swipe B Book Cover, Swipe B Facebook Ads, Swipe B Promoted Tweets. And then,
finally, the third modality of tagging, and you're going to see why this is valuable in a second
so just stick with me here, is Swipe C 'person's name', so right here I have John Smith, or
Swipe C 'company name'. So A, B, C, it's simple as A, B, C. Yes, that was supposed to be
funny. Haha.
Anyway, you have your swipe file, that's going to be the tag that always create and then
depending on what media types, those are going to be your B swipe file tags and then your C
swipe file tags are going to the person's name and/or company name.
So here's how we're going to tag this. So let's just say that I had a picture of a banner here that
took from surfing on the web and I'm going to go up here to the top here and add a tag here and
I can just go SWIPE and they all fall down there which is just beautiful. You click 'Swipe A
File' which I've already done here and I'm going to try, I'll just pop this here. So Swipe A File
and then I'm going to do Swipe B Banner because we are in, again, we are in the banner's
notebook and then Swipe C Ryan Smith. Now, I did not know what Ryan Smith's company
name was so I just looked at the ad and, again, you've got to work with this the way you want to
work with it that's going to work best for your brain. But at the end of the day, I just did A file,
B banner, C person name.
Now, for the company name ones. You're going to do 'Swipe A File, 'Swipe B Banner',
'Swipe C Company Name', which is C Staples, I just used that as an example. So Swipe C
Staples. Now, as you can imagine the reason this is really valuable the reason why these tags
are so important with how you're micromanaging this way is, let's say that I went to you and I
said, "I want to see all of your banners that Staples has run that you've saved in your swipe
file". Let me show you how to do that.
What you're going to do is you're going to click the banner's notebook, you're going to come
down here and you're going to go Swipe A File and then you're going to come up here and go
Swipe B Banner, and you're going to Swipe B. As you know this is not always perfect, Swipe
A File, Swipe B Banner, Swipe C Staples. Boom. Search. Then only banners in your swipe
file from Staples are going to all show up here and then it gives you the ability go click, click,
click, click. Oh! I have my inspiration, I can go and create my banner now. And so that is the
reason why these tags are so important is because it allows you to filter anything that you want
to get to quickly and efficiently.
So, again, let's just say that you wanted to look at your entire swipe file of only banners. So
what you would do is would click, 'swipe file' at the top and you would click, Swipe B Banner,
search. So it only pulls up all of the banners in your swipe file. Now let's just say you were
going to do only company names or a person. Now say that you would want to, you know that
one company has banners, they do emails, they do websites. Let's say you wanted to be
company specific. Again, you would want to click the stack total up here, you go, Swipe, let's
just see company specifics, so Swipe C Staples, search.
So you would see the banners of Staples in, you would see the Facebook ads of Staples in here,
you would see the emails that Staples sends. All of their marketing, company specific would
all be in this note.
I hope you're excited when I figured this out and cracked the code on this, it was a totally
freeing experience because I finally knew that I create a swipe file that was a) easy to access, b)
easy to organize, c) easy to populate and d) easy to find whatever I wanted, when I wanted to
create future campaigns. Because I'm in the marketing consulting business growth space and
so my swipe file is massive full of different copy swipes, banner swipes, email swipes, capture
page swipes, sales page swipes, video swipes, the whole thing. And with this set up it easily
allows me to go back to my swipe file and easily find what I'm looking for depending on what I
need to create.
So, I really hope that this was massively valuable for you. If you haven't already done so, I
highly recommend that you sign up for updates. Go to scottbradley.name/evernotetips and here
you're going to find a form to sign up and every time that I have a new video posted to the
channel, I will be sending you an email letting you. And that's pretty much the main purpose
of this email list that you're signing up for. Every new video, you get an email. So you get it
on time, immediate and we don't have to rely on YouTube which isn't always the most reliable.
So, I hope you enjoyed this video, as you can see here I also created book covers, Facebook ads,
promoted Tweets, websites and so it really allows you to, I'm just looking at the book covers
here, you have the image of the book, what you liked. Again, tagging, Swipe A File, Swipe B
Book Cover, Swipe C Sally Sue, because we knew the author's name. Again, very simple, easy,
straight forward, I hope this was valuable for you. If you haven't already done so, please do
subscribe to the channel. Sign up for email updates and I really do appreciate your thumbs up
and your likes and sharing these with your network.
Have a great rest of your day. A wonderful rest of the week and I look forward to making the
next video for you. Have a good one. Bye bye.
Captions by GetTranscribed.com