How to Use Mind Maps to Build Better Content?
Mind Maps
Mind maps are a great way to help you write down your ideas and find connected thoughts you didn’t know might be related to help generate content ideas. You can start with a single, abstract thought and develop many supporting and related ideas simply by writing them down and drawing connections. Or you can take an existing idea, or blog post topic, and develop more blog post ideas from it. It’s up to you on how you want to use them!
How to Use Mind Maps to Build Better Content?
Use Mind Mapping to Generate New Blog Post Ideas
One of the most common uses of the mind mapping technique is for brainstorming. You start with a central concept and branch off from there with all of the ideas that pop into your head.
Mind mapping lets you capture your ideas quickly: you’re just writing brief descriptions rather than lengthy summaries. And the more ideas you capture, the more ideas you’ll have: as you capture digital ideas, your mind will make associations that will lead you to additional ideas.
Use Mind Mapping to Plan Your Keyword Strategy
If you’re using your blog to generate organic search traffic, your goal may be less to come up with general ideas. And more to come up with ideas that are related to specific keywords you want to target. A blog mind map can help with that, too.
First, gather a list of keywords you want to target on your blog. Place each keyword in its own branch off of the center. Then sit down and brainstorm topics you could write about. Or landing pages you could create to target each of those keywords.
Use Mind Maps to Create Blog Outlines and Content Briefs
Once you have ideas for the blog posts you want to write, you can create mind maps to use as outlines for your digital blog posts to quickly capture what you want to write about. Or, to use as briefs for the writers who will be writing the blog posts you came up with.
Use them to Create an Index of Your Content Library
For many bloggers and content marketers, you start off by just creating content. But after you’ve been blogging for a while, you start to lose track of what you’ve already covered.
Are you targeting the same keywords with multiple blog posts? Are there opportunities to curate some of your posts into collections to take advantage of the hub and spoke strategy? Do you have any gaps—topics you should have covered but haven’t?
A blog mind map makes it easy. To take an inventory of all of your published content and categorize it by marketing topic.
Use them to Map Content to Buying Journeys
Once you’ve inventoried all of your content, you can also use your map to map all of the blog posts you’ve written to their respective spots in the buying journey.
Not only will this help you find new ways to connect content together with internal links to move prospective customers deeper into your funnel. But it will also help you see if you have too much marketing content in any specific stage of the journey.