Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 204: Steal Like an Artist? Protecting Your Original Work as a Travel Advisor
Transcript
- Rachel: Okay, we're recording. Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. I'm a travel agency owner, helping travel advisors. And I'm gonna talk like this the whole episode. No, I'm not. I help you all become the CEO of your travel business through this podcast and a lot of other things. Podcast is free ninety nine. Other things you can find over at elevatewithrachelk.com. I need to write down a note while I'm batch. 203. Okay. Today's episode is expanding on the paid lead magnet slash paid small offer, adding additional revenue streams based on your knowledge, even if it's not something you sell, but it's something you know a lot about with regards to the travel industry. Now don't be like, I'm a travel agent and I love macrame. Well, I mean you could, but don't post that on your travel agency page. I mean you could, but also don't be like, no, I have a course 'cause then your audience on your travel agency page is gonna be like, You have a course for macrame? Do you even sell travel? Keep it kind of cohesive, okay? Alright, so we're gonna touch on creative borrowing versus straight up stealing. It does happen, and you can do the creative borrowing, just don't do the straight-up copying. Okay if and this has happened, I'm talking about this today because it has been brought up. A phenomenal travel advisor I know has this amazing lead magnet and has worked so hard on it, and I think it was launched last year and then immediately polled because when she was getting the email list, it was like eighty percent of them were like Sarah travels magical Disney travel at Gmail or like Jane's destination honeymoons at Outlook. Like she knew they were travel agents taking her lead magnets and she was like and at first I was like calm down, you know, imitation is the highest form of flattery. They clearly like what you're doing. They clearly like your message. They clearly do not have a creative bone in their body, so they gotta kinda pull stuff. And also, it's gonna happen, you know? But please don't do that if you're a travel advisor. If you see someone else's stuff, message them directly and be like, hey, I really like the idea of your lead magnet. They're not gonna share it with you. Just give them a compliment, okay? They're not gonna Many travel advisors are not gonna be like, you like it? Well, you can use it. They may ask you to pay a price for it. Please don't steal stuff fully like that, okay? Anyway, that lead magnet has been polled because such a huge number of travel advisors were signing up for it rather than and I looked at it and I'm like, there's no wording here that like indicates this is for travel advisors. So they were advisors just stealing it to have something. And probably edit it in Canva. I'm not happy about it. So this episode is very heavily influenced on that situation. I've had it happen to me with like my social media content. Travel agencies just straight up stealing almost verbatim my copy, but switching out the name of the resort. And I'm just like, good job. Good job. Okay. Anyway, you've probably had this experience yourself. You see someone else's post, it looks a little too familiar. I even see emails now in my inbox where I'm like, huh, I was talking about that a year ago. You know? Like that's going to happen. but if it's like super familiar and you're like, wait a dern minute. There's a book, I think I've brought it up before, called Steal Like an Artist by Austin Cleon. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. The Core Ideas, totally worth understanding. You can go buy it and read it if you want. I highly recommend reading so you're not doing the doomy scrollies. Pfft, which I do every day, it's fine. But I also read every day. But it actually cuts both ways in the conversation. Cleon's argument is that almost nothing is created in a total vacuum. Every creator is influenced by what came before them, remixing and building upon ideas they've absorbed. This is so common. Like, this is why every travel advisor is using one of maybe five travel CRMs, maybe five, right? And I'm basing this off the US. Every travel advisor is working with one of five. Wholesalers or suppliers for the bulk of like their all-inclusive resort trips. Okay? my alarm's going off. We're just gonna have to ride with that. Please ignore the dinging in the background. Every travel advisor is going to have their basic steps, but the thing that separates you, even if you are in the exact same niche as someone and you do very similar things, is who you are as an individual, because we're all created to be different, okay? All right, Austin's point isn't copying is fine because it's not. Straight up copying means you're not doing the work. It's that creativity is less about pure inspiration and real originality. Like most people don't get divine inspiration to create things. Most people are combining their life experiences And the struggles they see and the pain points, and then they're like, this needs to be made to solve this problem. My alarm's gonna go off this whole episode. It's fine. All right, the specific combination, the added branding voice, which we talked about a long time ago in this podcast. gosh, probably in the t day twenties episodes, if you want to look back that far. And the personal twist. That's what makes something recognizably yours rather than a carbon copy of someone else's. That's an important distinction to hold on to because it means not everyone who's inspired by your work is stealing from you. Someone seeing your content style and being motivated and inspired to start their own version in their own voice is normal and even a healthy part of how creative industry works. That's different from someone taking your exact wording, your exact framework, your exact guide, and presenting it as their own with barely a word changed. Okay? So My alarm's just gonna roll. It's happening. I hope you guys don't hear it, but I feel like this mic picks up everything. Hold on. I don't think it's coming in through the mic So I probably just sound crazy today. You can go to other people's travel websites, for example, or any kind of website doing any kind of service-based marketing and review their copy and be like, I like this concept that they bring up. How can I put this in my own voice? Right. But just copy and paste the entire thing and no, don't do that. Okay. What I want to say very plainly, especially once you start sharing things publicly on social media with complete stranger dangers. Remember when we were little, and I know this gets brought up a lot, but we were like, don't talk to strangers, and now we're just like talking to complete strangers all the time. Anyway. Not just your own client base base, but also with strangers. Some other advisors will take what you've created and repurpose it as their own. It will happen. Especially if you have like a nice solid formula and you're following like very good marketing strategies and copywriting strategies. They're not hopefully not going to do it word for word. Please don't do it word for word. Please do not do that. But they might be like, I like this. I like how they have the layout. Okay, I'm just thinking of like a digital guide lead magnet off the top of my head. Like I like the layout of how they instantly go in and tell a story of the problem the person is fail finding out, sorry, realizing they have as they're trying to plan X type of travel. And then they give five succinct, clear, concise tips, and then they give a bonus tip. Like this is like general framework for Lead Magnet, by the way. Quote unquote bonus tip, work with a travel advisor, book a call with me, you know? And then like a bonus page of like maybe a packing list or something, you know? Like something th that's more value than what they originally signed up for. Anyway, it's gonna happen. And it's not very it's it's it feels icky, it feels uncomfortable, it doesn't ever stop being uncomfortable because you're like, that's my baby, and you kind of like get mama berry about it, be like, that's my creation, what are you doing with it? But it becomes far less destabilizing once you expect it, rather than feeling like you're blindsided by it. So Yesterday's episode was all about knowledge-based services and how you can create an additional minor passive revenue stream. And it connects to today's topic. This alarm is still not going off. I'm just roll with it, everybody. Freely giving away your most detailed, very, very original frameworks to total strangers on social. is the highest risk way to share your best work. Lead magnets should have a ton. Everything you give away for free should have a ton of value, don't get me wrong. But it's fully public, easily screenshotted, easily repackaged by someone else with your your name just quietly removed. So charging for your super duper duper detailed or original material changes that dynamic. It doesn't make copying impossible, but it does a few things that puts your best work behind a smaller, more invested audience rather than the entire like worldwide web. It creates a paper trail, there's a purchase, a sale, and that can matter if you do need to address someone lifting your content directly. and frankly it filters out the people who are like, you're only getting people who actually value what you built enough to pay for it. Rather than people scanning content for something to screenshot. Okay? A few other steps you can do. You can watermark any kind of like visual guise very clearly. You need to keep all your original files and you want to make sure that they are like I mean people can still copy some of that stuff. you want to keep all of your original files you've created, drafts that you've created, notes about it, with timestamps. In case you do need to establish that you created something first. If you don't have any of that, this is why I'm a psycho for notebooks. Reason five billion. I have I have everything noted and saved everywhere in my travel agency and in the elevate with Rachel K. Everything. When I like some of the stuff that I created and Elevate. I came up with before Elevate existed and I was in another business called TA Toolbox, by the way. And it was something that like my partner at the time is like, I don't know if we should move forward, but since we were 50-50, we both had to agree on the decision. And so I was like, okay, well, I'm just gonna move this over to my new business. So including this podcast, BT Dubs. 'cause I think the podcast was a lot back then anyway. All right. But you need to be able to have a thorough record that you actually created something first. Because you might get a letter from an attorney someday being like, I'm threatening to sue you. You need to cease and desist. But if you're like, bitch, I created this two years before this guy was even in business, no, I don't. You've nothing to worry about. Okay. And your most, most valuable frameworks, content. that you use in your business, the ones that re represent your real time and expertise. Keep those in the paid products and in your services. As a travel advisor, you can pull little tidbits for a free post, but you don't want to give it all away all at once. Tomorrow we're gonna do some mindset. Next couple days is gonna be more mindset. Practical protections only go so far. How you personally handle watching someone else do what you do is honestly the bigger and longer term skill. Because some some people can't handle other people doing anything remotely similar to them, and that's not a good idea. Let's change that mindset. On day 205, today is day 204. I'm gonna go make sure that alarm doesn't go off in this next episode. Have a good day.