How To: Set Up Your Digital Asset Library as a Freelancer (in 5 Easy Steps)
While driving solo has its perks, being a creative freelancer comes with its own set of challenges not everyone can appreciate – one of the least-obvious yet most burdensome is when your creative digital assets scatter uncontrollably.
Before you know it, all hell breaks loose and you’re steamrolled by an avalanche of unstoppable daily admin of your own creation. Top work.
A freelancer’s unique sense of autonomy is what sets them apart from others. That said, managing your brand, creative workflows and centralizing assets – while collaborating with external partners – are other common challenges many creatives are facing.
Digital Asset Management systems (DAM) and asset libraries are a simple fix for bringing order to the spiraling chaos your daily work can turn into.
With headless DAM, your creative assets, workflows and collaborations all come under single mode of total control while letting you scale your freelancer proposition competitively.
Here’s a quick guide on setting up your freelance DAM asset library in 5 steps:
Step 1: Better-organize and annotate digital assets
If your OCD flares up and you find yourself manually obsessing over organizing your digital assets, we applaud you. Though manual OCD costs you a ton of time.
If, hand-on-heart, you know your digital assets are in total disarray, we feel your pain.
Well, fret no more as headless DAM makes it incredibly easy to quickly bulk-upload and migrate 1000s of assets from your existing digital assets digital library.
How can you navigate 1000s of digital assets, versions copies and a jungle of files? A next-gen asset library cleverly associates metadata to each asset, making it a breeze to organize, search and group assets by automatically correlating creative products together.
No need to spend hours renaming and sorting your assets.
Step 2: Integrate your existing platforms into your asset library
Centralize your digital assets with a DAM’s painless API integration solutions from your existing platforms and apps (Adobe Photoshop, Email Management, CMS, Project Management systems etc.).
It really is that simple.
Step 3: Define and manage creative workflows
Once the integration has been done, now the fun begins!
Keep the momentum going by organizing your assets with DAM’s metadata feature where you can tag the type, date, location and any other preferred search term for your creative assets.
But wait, there’s more:
An asset library’s markup feature allows you to add real-time comments, provide feedback on creative digital assets or decide whether you want to ‘save or trash’ a version before it goes to distribution.
Did we mention you can share the approved version directly with the client from your asset library? Easy-peasy.
Being able to quickly search and locate your (most up-to-date) digital assets within your digital library will boost your productivity and streamline digital production output processes.
You know what this means, right? Less admin. Less emails. Protecting your DAM creative flow.
Step 4: Set up security for your assets and collaborators
Ok, now back to being serious – and by being serious, we mean ‘protecting- -your-DAM-digital-assets’ serious.
Fortunately, next-gen headless DAM platforms already have built-in security and compliance features, making it easy for you to:
- Grant or deny access requests from collaborators
- Set expiration dates based on estimated completion of production and revoke access from users who would no longer need to enter your digital library
- Add watermarks onto your digital assets so they don’t fall into the wrong hands
Step 5: Manage your brand by scaling your asset production output
Even as a one-man band, you still somehow need to keep track of what you’re doing. An asset library also has a project management extension where you can create projects, update and monitor the progress and output.
An asset library gives you a holistic view of your digital assets and products, as well as key indicators on areas that might be lacking within your digital production cycle.
Hey, you’re doing great! By reading this article, it has put you already one step forward by reaching your business goals.
Put back the ‘free’ in freelancer and let globaledit show you how their DAM’s next-gen digital library solutions can be a great fit for your freelancing business.