The Steal Club - How to Steal content (the right way)

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This is The Steal Club, a newsletter for creative entrepreneurs.

We share lessons, strategies, frameworks, and templates to grow your audience. “Stolen” from the best creators in the industry.

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👋 A message about Stealing

This week I talked about "Stealing" content on LinkedIn and found some resistance.

Some people didn't agree with the use of the word "Steal" when it comes to online content.

And I get it.

When it's so easy to just plagiarize others, saying that you "steal" content doesn't sound nice.

But as the founder of The Steal Club, I have something to say:

The use of the term Stealing here, in this context, is more rooted in inspiration.

Some people confuse Stealing with directly copying. That isn’t nice. I don’t support that in any case.

Instead, what we do around here is look at what works for others and use that as the root for our own content, project, services, ideas...you name it.

We get inspired.

We feed from multiple sources.

We mix it up in our brain and THEN we create something.

I just wanted to make that clear. As Kirby Ferguson says, Creativity is a remix.​

🕵️‍♂️ Steal this: My system to "steal" content

One question I get a lot is how am I able to generate so many content ideas.

The cool answer → I steal them 😎

The real answer → I have a system in place to generate and create those ideas.

This is this system.

#0 - The basics

Whenever I look at a piece of content, I pay attention to two things:

• The structure
• And/Or The big idea

This is where the stealing begins. Sometimes I take the structure, sometimes the idea, and sometimes both.

This is how I do it (with real examples) 👇

#1 - Stealing the idea

Browsing Twitter, I found this tweet from my friend Andrea.

What stood out to me from this tweet is how clear the “big idea” was → Pointing out classic mistakes founders make.

And I thought, how can I apply this to creators? What’s a classic mistake that creators make?

One of these mistakes is spreading yourself too thin. Some creators try to be everywhere when they start out.

The result? They burn out and quit after a few weeks.

This concept served as inspiration for me to write this tweet 👇

I took the big idea Andrea had in his tweet (classic mistakes) and gave it a new spin to it, adapting it to my niche (creators + content).

#2 - Stealing the structure

One of my fav things to do when creating content is take a look at what structures these top creators use to craft their content.

I have a huge swipe file of structures, and I can tell you how easy this makes my content creation process.

I often find myself bookmarking tweets and posts just because of the structure. Then, you need to identify what are the changeable parts within that structure to generate a template 👇

Then, once we have that template, we can fill it however we prefer 👇

#3 - Stealing both

This LinkedIn post caught my eye for two reasons:

• How it looks (aka structure) → Inverted pyramid + list structure
• And the big idea behind it → Things that “destroy” a post

This example from Matt is specific to LinkedIn, but I can quickly adapt it to Twitter, email, or Instagram.

Here’s my take (adapted to Twitter):

I took the big idea and the structure and made it my own.

This is how you do proper Content Stealing.

How can you Steal content?

Remember, the core of stealing in the creative context relies more on inspiration than copy-pasting.

You need to identify the big idea and the structures behind every piece of content.

Then create new content starting from either (or both).

Once you learn to do so, Stealing (the good kind) becomes way easier.

By the way, this method is valid for ANY platform out there. Content stealing can be done everywhere!

💰Steal worthy

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And that’s a wrap!

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Thanks for being part of the club! See you next week!

Alex Llull Thief Master The Steal Club Share this newsletter | Say 👋 on Twitter | Sponsor this newsletter