Plan Your SharpSpring file naming in Step 9 of “Get Going Faster”

By the time you’ve created a couple of dozen files in SharpSpring, you’ll realize you need a way to name and group all your emails, posts, media, lists, and reports so that you can find them quickly. SharpSpring doesn’t usually sort this type of content chronologically. At E6 Solutions, we recommend you establish a company-wide method of SharpSpring file naming BEFORE generating a lot of content, lists, and files.

In their Help Center, SharpSpring provides good guidance: Organizing Files and Using Name Conventions in SharpSpring. However, we found that SharpSpring file naming conventions do not emphasize the advantages of creating folders specifically for your recent work. At the end of a cycle (usually a few months), you may re-sort your files into subject or project folders to create a more convenient archive.

This-Month/Last-Month folders

During the work routine of content marketing, fresh stories and media may be used frequently for a brief period. For instance, a new blog post may be included in an email newsletter, shared in social media, placed on a landing page, and used as part of a message in an Action Group. If more than one external link is included in the initial blog post, you may want to track their performance separately.

At E6 Solutions, the new media files we create are initially placed in a folder entitled “1-ThisMonth.” At the end of each month, we rename 1-ThisMonth to 2-LastMonth, and 2-LastMonth to a “Year-Month” label. In this way, every recent piece of media is at our fingertips. Emails, Lists, Action Groups, and Visual Workflows are handled in a similar way. However, filing and re-categorizing blog posts is slightly more cumbersome since you don’t have folders. If you blog frequently, and especially if those posts get outdated, you’ll probably want to categorize them by month in a YYYYMM format. THEN, you may also want one or more separate subject-named categories for evergreen posts. Reports names should probably always start with a date using the YYYYMMDD format.

Tags are especially valuable in managing contacts, lists, and campaigns. Just be sure and give them an obvious and consistent spelling so you don’t end up with two tags for one thing you’re tracking or grouping.

More tips for file names

If you have a large team and many projects, SharpSpring has detailed recommendations on organizing for complex project management. For smaller companies, we can probably use simpler, more recognizable names.

If you’re encountering problems we haven’t covered here, you can do an internet search on “naming conventions” and find many more specialized resources. We found this site at Stanford University very helpful. Here are some of their general tips:

• A good format for date designations is YYYYMMDD or YYMMDD. This format makes sure all of your files stay in chronological order, even over the span of many years.
• Try not to make file names too long, since long file names do not work well with all types of software.
• Special characters such as ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) ` ; < > ? , [ ] { } ‘ ” and | should be avoided.
• When using a sequential numbering system, using leading zeros for clarity and to make sure files sort in sequential order. For example, use “001, 002, …010, 011 … 100, 101, etc.” instead of “1, 2, …10, 11 … 100, 101, etc.”
• Do not use spaces. Some software will not recognize file names with spaces, and file names with spaces must be enclosed in quotes when using the command line. Other options include:
  • Underscores, e.g. file_name.xxx
  • Dashes, e.g. file-name.xxx
  • No separation, e.g. filename.xxx
  • Camel case, where the first letter of each section of text is capitalized, e.g. FileName.xxx