2 simple tips for organizing images that will save you time and money

This is episode #18 of The Goodness Squad podcast. We’re going to talk about a very easy, time-saving tip that I wish I had implemented way earlier in my businesses. I love time-saving tips because I believe that a minute saved in your business is $10 earned.

The process You go through selecting images as a content marketer

Let’s set the stage for this tip. You are about ready to publish a blog post social media post, a podcast episode, whatever that is, and you need an image. We use images all the time in content marketing, and you need an image. You have a bunch of images on your hard drive and so you go looking through them and start searching for just the right image for that particular piece of content.

This might take you 3-5 minutes, it might even take you 10-15 minutes. Let’s say it takes you an average of 4 minutes. That is at least 20 minutes a week. And that’s only if you are publishing 5 images a week. Most of us content marketers are publishing a whole lot more than that if we are on lots of different social media platforms. But let’s just say 4 minutes per image, 5 images per week, that is over an hour per month or 17 hours per year.

Let’s say your time is worth a conservative $30 per hour. That is over $500 for your year that you are spending trying to find these images. But what if all those images took you just 1 minute to find instead? That would be just 20 minutes a month or around 4 hours a year. That saves you 13 hours of time or nearly $400. 

The point I’m trying to make here doesn’t apply to just the tip I’m going to give you today. It applies to all tiny, time-saving tips. I love tiny tips. I love finding tiny pockets of time that really are more than they seem. This tip is worth implementing because it will save you a large portion of time.

You get to choose how to spend your time in your business

What could you do with an extra 13 hours every year? Could you create an ebook? Could you create a new lead magnet? Freemium? What could you do with that time? Could you add one more coaching client? That time is so valuable. So there are two steps to make this happen, to make it change it from, three to five minutes to find an image to just one.

2 steps for organizing your images

Step #1

 Create albums on your phone so that when you take a picture, you can upload it to an album. Now you can also take this one step further. This is what I do. I have folders on my Google drive so then when I take a picture that I know might work for a blog post or an Instagram post, I can then immediately upload it to Google drive to one of those folders. Then it’s very easy for me to access from anywhere.

You should have 5 main folders to organize your images into. These are the five main topics that you talk about. For me, these are my family, the goodness of other women – I love to highlight other women and their businesses online. Number three is my content, so whether that’s a podcast episode or a blog post, any sort of content that I want to drive traffic to. Number four are quick tips I like to share, just like I do here in this podcast; quick, easy to implement tips. And then number five are personal things about me that help people to get to know me. These can be things like I love cheese. They’re just personal, kind of, quirks about me that help people to see me as a real person.

So I have these five folders and when I take a picture, I upload it to one of those folders. It takes me 20 to 30 seconds max. Then when I save that image, instead of saving it as whatever it came up in my phone, like image 27596384, I save it instead as a descriptive name.

I typically choose emotions. So, for instance, maybe I would save it as happy, excited, then I will add the place. So maybe couch or living room or bedroom or outside. And then I would add any items that are in the picture that I often like to use in my marketing. So maybe computer or screen or keyboard or desk or pen or writing. Then I usually write down what the person is doing. So that would be something like writing or typing or listening or laughing. 

So I write down the emotion, the place, the items in the picture, and then what is actually being done in the picture. This makes it so easy to find the perfect image for any social media posts, blog posts, anything. This takes less than 60  seconds total. And then all you have to do when you need the image, is go to that folder.

For example, I’m going to share something personal about myself and search in that folder. I want it to be something that is fun. And so I search for the word fun and 10 images pop up and I get to pick one.

 So, this is really easy peasy going forward, right? 20 to 30 seconds to move it to a folder, 20 to 30 seconds to name it something descriptive.

step #2

You probably have a lot of images already on your computer. If you want to make these searchable, I have a simple tip for you. Hire a team. If you have a team in your home, hire them. I hired my kids to go back and do this for me with my images. Super simple, super easy. I paid $5 an hour, and they loved it because, well they didn’t love it, to be honest, they didn’t think it was very much fun. But it was a whole lot easier than scrubbing floors or pulling weeds. And they were getting paid $5 an hour to do it. I loved it because I didn’t have to pay somebody else more than that. And I didn’t have to spend my own time doing it, and it saves me time in the future.

In summary, when you save time in your business, you can earn more money. And one simple way that I’m challenging you to do that today is to start organizing your images and making sure they are well labeled. If you do so, you will save a lot of time to work on bigger, more important things in your business. You will have more income and a bigger, more profound impact on others.

A Quick Favor

If you are getting value out of this podcast, I know that others will to. Let them know about the quick, easy to implement tips that you find here in this podcast and how they’ve affected your business by leaving a review. I will appreciate it. And so will they.