Cluster Your Articles with this Simple Method: the Content Map
In the past year, I’ve written more than 100 articles online.
The articles are spread among different topics.
They are in different formats (short-form and long-form) writing and they reach from personal stories to in-depth book summaries. With the number of published articles steadily growing, it becomes more and more challenging to keep a good overview.
I decided to create a content map to cluster the articles I’ve written.
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| Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash |
What is a content map?
I am sure there are dozens of definitions of what a content map is and what it should look like.
I didn’t try any of these.
Instead, I created my method.
As I’ve always been fond of sorting and categorizing, I found the process very joyful and I think there shouldn’t be too much of a template if you want to create a content map.
What I did was …
- A brief brainstorming about the main categories I want to use.
- A brief brainstorming about other meta-data that might be interesting.
- Create a big visualization with all 100+ articles on it.
- Link articles that belong together.
My content map 1.0
My result: a big visualization with all my articles.
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| My Content Map 1.0, by Matthias Karner |
Categories
The articles are colored in 4 different category-colors (and their combinations) representing the main topic of a certain article.
- Productivity: This was the topic I started writing about and as you can see, it is the niche I am writing most of my article.
- Leadership: These articles originate either from the leadership literature I am reading or are summaries of my personal experiences as a leader.
- Digital Transformation: Although I wanted to write a lot about digital transformation, my content map shows, that I am actually mostly publishing within the first two categories.
- Other: This is a collector-category for topics I occasionally write about (personal finance, writing, …)
Article types
I also wanted to incorporate the type of article and created 3 additional categories, drawn as rows in the visualization:
- Method, concept, idea: Here I collected articles that explain a single method/concept/idea or a list of related methods/concepts/ideas.
- Book summary, book list: This is self-explanatory. In this row I categorized articles that either summarize a whole book or are list-like articles with book-recommendations.
- Personal journey & opinion: These are articles based on my personal experiences or where I share my opinion.
Links
Another crucial element in the content map are the links: they show article series or where an article sparked the idea of a follow-up article.
They are particularly interesting for analysis as they visualize clusters of similar ideas and also show where a follow-up could still be interesting.
What next?
The thing about a content map is: there are countless ways how to do it and it is never really complete: it changes with every new article.
I recognized that the visualization is very busy. A main reason for that is, that I’ve used the full article names. When I’ll make my version 2.0 (and I will definitely do a follow-up version), I’ll replace the titles with numbers to save space within the visualization and provide a legend to find the article corresponding to a number
With that I can focus more on the actual clustering and linking of the articles (instead of packing everything into a readable form).
What do you think of the idea of a content map? How do you manage your articles and keep track of them? Please share your thoughts in the comments at Medium, e-mail me, or write me on LinkedIn.