How to Build a Swipe File with Notion

If you want to learn how to build a swipe file that even your competitors would envy…

You’re in the right place.

In this blog post, I’ll explain my process for building swipe files with Notion, step-by-step. 

That way, by the time you finish reading, you’ll be able to begin building a direct response swipe file, like this:

Let’s get started.

What is a Swipe File?

If you’re unfamiliar, a swipe file is a collection of tested and proven advertising ideas. Traditionally, that collection might have included print ads, mailing, and sales letters. But in today’s digital age, that might also mean banner ads, email campaigns, online marketing strategies, and more.

I recently screengrabbed this churn prevention strategy and added it to my marketing swipe file.

While swipe files were traditionally analog (that is, managed offline, in filing cabinets, and such), apps like Evernote and Notion have simplified the entire process. Thanks to such apps, when you add an idea to your collection, you can tag, search, and retrieve that idea with a few clicks of a mouse. 

While “swiping” ideas is a great way to hone your copywriting chops (if you rewrite them by hand, that is), it’s important to mention there’s a crucial difference between swiping and stealing. 

Swiping, says legendary copywriter Dan Kennedy, is about building up “idea files.” That way, if you’re ever struggling to come up with a marketing angle when writing, you can refer to your swipe file for inspiration.

To quote Kennedy, “You do not need much creativity to write [copy]; you only need to be adept at recycling and reorganizing ideas, themes, words, and phrases.”

Now that we understand the difference between swiping and stealing, and which to focus on, let’s dive into how to build a direct response swipe file with Notion.

How to Build a Swipe File with Notion (Step-by-Step)

If you’re new to Notion, create a free account first. Otherwise, if you’re an existing user, go to your workspace and create a new page.

Then, choose “List.”

Next, rename “Untitled” to “Swipe File” and open Page 1.

Then, copy an image or GIF, if you have one already saved to your desktop, and paste it into the page. 

I’ve included here a recent marketing strategy that I screengrabbed.

After, click “Tags” and change “Multi-Select” to “Select.” Then, rename “Tags” to “What.” Next, write what the example is—an ad, an email, a sales letter.

Finally, give the page a memorable name. For instance, in the example above, I named it, “Harry’s Offer a Mystery Item in Their Cart Abandonment Popup.” Then, I tagged it as “Website Popup” under “What,” and “Tactic: Upselling” and “Tactic: Customer Activation” for “Context.”

Here’s what the final example might look like:

If you commit to the process of building a swipe file, over time, you will have dozens, if not hundreds of, tested and proven marketing ideas. And that’s when having a good organizational system becomes essential.

For that reason, I recommend creating a legend and having it as its own page to describe all the tags you’re using. That what, if you’re ever looking for a specific idea (e.g., a social-proof-based marketing strategy), you know exactly how it’s named.

If you alphabetize your swipe file, adding an exclamation mark in front of “Legend” will ensure it’s always first in the “List” view.

How to Build a Headline Swipe File in Notion

While I love my marketing swipe file, but what I’m most proud of is my headline swipe file.

In it, I’ve collected than 100 proven and tested headlines across a range of industries, tagged by type (e.g., urgency, social proof, scarcity, etc.). 

Further, I’ve reverted each back to its original headline formula. That way, I can learn from and model each for my own headline writing.

For instance, a few months back, I was browsing Pocket when this headline caught my eye:

I thought it would make a nice addition to my swipe file. So, I dropped it into Notion and broke it down into a swipeable plug-and-play formula:

A few months later, I was struggling to come up with a good headline for my post on Audible. So, I jumped into Notion, filtered headlines by “Stories,” and…

Well, let’s just say the rest is history.

I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. And if you follow a similar practice with your headline writing, you won’t ever have to either.

Bonus: How to Build an Email Swipe File

At Sleeknote, we write a lot about email marketing. The problem, though, is rarely, if ever, do we have a good example to cite when needed.

So, a few years ago, the content team and I created a new Gmail account and began subscribing to every good e-commerce newsletter in existence. Then, using labels, we categorized all emails by (1) the brand, and (2) type.

That way, if we’re ever writing about, say, cart abandonment, we can go into our Gmail swipe file, click, “Cart Abandonment,” and quickly find a good example.

While our Gmail swipe file requires manual work to categorize each email, we never spend more than 15-minutes a week in our inbox.

Wanting others to benefits from our findings, we recently created a new resource for our customers where we In it, we took our favorite emails and put them in a private Notion workspace.

To do that, we choose our favorite campaigns, turned each into a PDF, and then added them to Notion. Maintaining an email swipe file is more labor-intensive, given the need to do more than take a screenshot. But I still recommend it for emails you know you will return to for inspiration in the future (e.g., product launches, nurture sequences, etc.).

Conclusion

If you’ve read my posts on how to build a Notion commonplace book and how to build a Resonance Calendar, then you’ll know I’m a big fan of finding new and interesting ways to use Notion…

And building swipe files are no exception.

They’re not where I want them to be, but one thing’s a given: both have made learning how to write good copy much, much easier.