Create Content Portfolio

[Matthew Sherborne]

Create Your Content Portfolio

One of the most effective things you can do to save time is to build a content portfolio. Your content portfolio is a folder that contains each of your three topics, separated by subject and date.

The work that goes into your content portfolio can be anything that you’ve written that you can use at a later time. It might be a snippet, fact, quote, full article or a note. Anything you’ve written can help you build more content at a much quicker pace.

Taking your content and restructuring it will allow you to make spin-off articles, cut down on research time and generally produce more content faster.

Whenever you write something and go to save it, don’t just dump it into “My Documents” or “Downloads” or wherever you put it. You’ll have a hard time finding it later. You need to put all of your work in a place where you will have a chance of locating it when you need it.

You should create a folder called ‘Content Portfolio’ and put it on your desktop where you can easily find it.




What you’re going to do next is open your newly created Content Portfolio folder and create a sub-folder for each of your three chosen niche topics.

Whenever you create content you’ll make a sub-folder for each item you produce. You should file these under the niche topic they belong in.

The subfolder will be named according to one of the following conventions. You choose the one that you’re most comfortable with.

Date Of Creation – You’ll name the sub folder with the creation date of the item. Use the yyyymmdd format so that when you do a sort, the folders appear in the order in which they were created, even if you do an alpha sort.

Name Of Subject – Name the sub folder after the subject it falls under. This way, if you create multiple articles of the same subject, you simply dump them all into this folder.

Name Of Article – For those who just want to get right to the article itself, then this is the best way. Simply create a folder that is the name of the article you wrote. This way you know exactly what’s inside when you look for it.

I prefer using the name of the article method, as the date it was created is naturally stored when you save the file. Saving your work in the content portfolio by the name of the article lets you see at a glance what you’ve previously created.




Naturally, you will have to create these folders on the fly as you actually save your work. This way, you have an ongoing process of keeping track of every item you’ve created. Over time, as these items add up, this system will save you a lot of time and aggravation trying to find that latest thing you were working on.




Here's the process of creating content...