How to use Mind Maps to Strategize and Organize your Content

Content is King.  We’ve all heard it, we all know it’s true.  The mistake many of us make is to start churning out content in a haphhazard manner, without a cohesive strategy.  I’ts easy not to pay attention to the structure and relation of each piece to the rest. While this is great for keeping up a writing schedule, it can become confusing for visitors to the site.

A Smarter Way to Plan Your Blog Content

You first step is to grab a program like Mindjet MindManager or an online program like MindMeister. These are great programs that make the mindmapping process much quicker and easier.

Next, you need to create your first bubble, which should be the name of your blog.

Figure out the 1-3 main topics that your blog will cover. We’ll use Gardening as an example and create these two categories:

• Indoor
• Outdoor

Next you’ll need to expand on these two main categories to come up with the subcategories. These are the smaller “main topics” that posts can be based on. The best way to think of these is that they can serve as the main topics that guides can be written on. Let’s return to our gardening example and create some subcategories.

Individual Blog Posts

Now we have some topics to work from when creating individual blog posts. This is where you really flesh out your mind map, adding in all of the different posts you want to create.

It’s very effective to mindmap posts with the “series” mentality. To use our example above, you could create a series of posts on an outdoor salad garden that completely cover the topic in an exhaustive manner. As a blog owners, your goal is to be the absolute number one source of information on your particular niche. By working out your content in this mindmap fashion, you essentially guarantee that you are going to cover all of the topics in your niche.

Incorporating Keyword Optimization into your Strategy

By mindmapping, you can organize your keywords in buckets, just like you’re organizing your content.  If you have a large exhaustive list of keywords that you’d like to optimize your site for, you can now work those into your mindmaps so you can be certain you are covering all of the different keyword buckets that revolve around your product.  In this way, you can target both primary, secondary, and long tail keywords.

Tightening Up Your Mindmap

If you follow the steps above you’ll be miles ahead of your competition when it comes to a cohesive blog content structure. However, you can take this a step further if you want. Add expected dates of completion to the individual blog posts on your mindmap to give yourself a posting schedule. This is going to help you keep putting out content on a regular schedule AND in a way that readers can really relate to. Now you’ll have a lot of content coming out just like before, but it will be organized and follow a logical flow for your readers, creating a much better user experience.

Author: Marcela de Vivo
Source at business2community.com