Are People Ripping Off Your Business? How To Deal With Copycats.

Are you ready for another Q & A Tuesday? Are you ready? I’m ready. Let’s do this.

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And shall we get this started? Yes, we shall. Jennifer writes: Q: “Hi Marie, I need a bit of advice. How do you manage to stay ahead of someone who is trying to blatantly copy your business as in very specifically so much so that it seems like a joke.” That’s not nice. “While still managing to keep your customers and the public updated with what you have going on and the good old pipeline. How do you keep yourself calm and brush off copycat tactics and how do you deal with the person who is doing the copying when you might run into them in social settings. Thanks so much. - Jennifer in Southeast Asia”

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A: Great question Jennifer and something that many of us have dealt with. I will tell you this: in the internet marketing/online coaching/advice giving kind of world or industry, there are so many people that rip each other off - it’s really not okay. You know they do it under the guise of modeling, this whole idea of “modelling”, and it’s kind of b.s. Because it’s not modeling at all. So what do I mean by modeling? No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, emulating someone’s practices. You know, what they do, their behavior, whatever they do in their life that lends to their success. 

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For instance, let’s say that you are an aspiring comedian and you want to model Sarah Silverman. So you read somewhere that Sarah Silverman carries around a little notebook so she can write joke ideas and all of her observations. So you do that. Sarah Silverman performs improv once a week so you start taking improv classes and you do that. Sarah says, she’s a vegetarian and vegetables make her funnier so you go vegetarian. 

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That’s all modeling but taking her jokes and passing them off as your own, that is copying. Copying is stealing and it’s lazy and it’s wrong. Copycats who take your ideas are annoying as hell. I personally have some copycat stories that will make your heads spin. We’ve had people that will just completely rip off and plagiarize my email copy and I’ve had people to even lift my event website design as though nobody knows and we can’t see it on the interwebs.

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You know there’s that saying, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I think it’s downright douchey. The good news is you can do something. So when you have copycats in your business, here are few steps that you can take: First up if someone is plagiarising your work or infringing upon your copyright, you have to have your attorney contact them. We have done this on several occassions and it works like a charm.

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Next, you always want to have a good friend that you can vent to. Any time that we discover copycats in our business, I just pick up the phone, talk to a good friend, and process it really quickly so I can get right back into the world.

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#3. Relish on the fact that you are leading in your industry because let’s face it, nobody is copying the losers. Use the fact that people are taking your ideas and copying them really inspire you to create better ideas, more inventive, more innovative, and more creative than ever before.

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I have a saying and it’s a tweetable, “When it comes to both money and creativity, there’s always more where that came from.” And finally, sometimes a frank conversation with a copycat is necessary. Because the truth is, copycats are doing themselves a disservice. We can all smell a copycat a mile away and their business will never be as successful as it is capable of being because it’s built on cheap imitation and stealing.

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That’s my A to your Q Jennifer. Thank you so much for asking it. This is definitely a hot topic so I want to hear this from you. How do you deal with copycats? You got any great strategies or advice or stories to share? Leave them below. 

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