Like many of you, I'm a small shop; my consulting business is just me and some people with complementary skill sets who help me out on occasion. Out of necessity and a slim budget, I do a lot of the tactical work myself, such as creating graphics, videos, copy as well as editing all of the above.

Although I've always been a writer, in my previous roles I served in more of a management position, overseeing others that were doing the creating. That experience led me to develop an eye for what I liked visually and how best to use images. I have learned a tremendous amount from the very creative people that have worked for me.

However, even though in the past I had been responsible for graphics, I had never created any graphics myself.

It wasn't until I was on my own that I truly appreciated the talents my former staff have.

I enjoy working with my clients and teaching them is a large part of my business. Learning new skills is among the most favorite parts of my job. I am self-taught in a variety of tasks for a number of Adobe products, including InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and how to manipulate PDFs.

While I did improve and continue to use those tools with the help of Lynda.com as my teacher, I quickly realized that the simplest approach is often the best. A week ago I was introduced to a relatively new online training tool that I refer to as the "Vine" of training. It's called Grovo. The reason for the analogy is that, as Vine is about looping 6-second videos, Grovo is about creative 60-second training modules.

Grovo's library of lessons is in the thousands and covers an array of Internet-specific tracks, from Facebook and Twitter to Office 365 and Google Apps. There are even lessons for Adobe Creative Cloud and many more. Each bite-sized lesson is followed up with a two- or three-question test to make sure you remember the main points. It's very easy to run through a dozen lessons at a clip and feel you've gained some valuable information that you can apply immediately.

One of Grovo's features is the capability to build tracks customized to your company's specific needs, complete with the questions. Another nice feature is the current nature of the information. We all know how fast social media changes; Grovo constantly monitors each of the platforms they teach and within 48 hours issues updates on discovering a change in feature or function. It can do this because the development team works in-house, from scripting to video and graphic creation.

My first time using the platform, I learned and implemented some SEO tactics for my WordPress website. That additional benefit has already paid for the monthly Grovo fee of $15.95 (or $7.50 for a 2-year commitment).

Sourcing Images

Most of my needs for graphics are for online use, such as changing my Facebook profile picture or cover image, creating a new banner image for an email or adding a graphic to a blog post. From an SEO perspective, images with the proper keywords and titles tying into the post's keywords and tags can help tremendously with being more discoverable to search engines.

I might keep it simple and look for free online images I can capture and use or incorporate into a new graphic, manipulating it to fit my need. Many images online can be captured by right-clicking the mouse selecting "Save as…" option. Before using, ensure that these images aren't copyrighted.

A product of TechSmith whose product lines include Camtasia, Jing allows you to "scrape" anything off the screen as a still image, or record up to 5 minutes of video of whatever screen activity is happening. You can save the files directly on your hard drive or copy a short URL to the file stored in the cloud, to share with others. This is especially helpful when I'm working with tech support for any situation. Being able to include a link to a screen capture or screencast video of my issue makes the problem very clear to the support person and generally helps resolve it much faster.

Free Online Tools

There are several free online tools for creating or manipulating graphics; some limit what you can do in the free environment, requiring an upgrade to save a photo in which you removed the background; others are completely free and even come with a mobile app version. Consider using Pilxr, Fotoflexer or PicMonkey.

Many of these tools can pull images from your computer as well as photos from your Facebook account or Picasa, Flickr and more. You can save back the edited photo to those platforms, too.

Paid Libraries

There are a number of online libraries that require subscription service. I had a subscription to ClipArt for a few years but found many of the images were outdated, so I stopped it.

Fotolia allows you to buy and bank "credits" and use them to buy images. The cost depends on the type of image and size you want to download. A credit starts at $1.35, then drops the more credits you buy at a time. Fotolia has a library of more than 24 million royalty-free stock photos and searching for just what you want is easy. Images can be anywhere from 1 credit to upward of hundreds of credits. I think the most I've ever spent is six credits for a particularly appropriate photo at a large, high-resolution size.

There are many other sites; do a browser search for "image libraries" or "free images" to bring up a large list.

Powerpoint: The Best-Kept Secret

PowerPoint, which is generally on everyone's PC or Mac, comes with a small library of images. But it's packed with very useful image creation and photo manipulation tools.

Although these tools are nice, I always recommend a professional designer if you have the money and time. Let an expert take care of the things that you don't have time for, if you can.

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