How to distill your long-form text into a killer infographic

It was like using a big funnel, or maybe a pasta maker that turned a huge amount of dough into fun shapes.

A while back, I wrote an e-book for Meltwater called “In-Sourcing Your Content,” with advice on how to empower your co-workers to write great articles.

The good news: People liked it so much that I was asked to transform the book into an infographic.

The bad news: How do you do that? My book was something like 14 trillion words. How do you get that down to something fun and visually digestible?

Here’s what I learned along the way. Let’s assume you’ve written an informative, useful piece of content. Where do you go from there?

1. Decide why you need an infographic.

You’ve seen all sorts of infographics. There are silly ones, promotional ones, educational ones or, in rare cases, one you’d hang up as a poster for its beauty or because it contains information you’d consult regularly.