The Driving Readers Mind Map
Driving Readers Mind Map
Mind Mapping is a great tool to have in your belt. I especially find it useful for condensing down articles that I see on other blogs. After reading through this article on the ProBlogger site, I wanted to act on the information on the blog, but I wanted it in a more condensed form.
Enter the Driving Readers Mind Map!
Getting The Layout Right
My first pass at the mind map would be in pencil, as I knew I was going to be all over the place re-organising things and deciding on ordering different keywords.
To start with I quickly identified an image to use as my central image. “How to Use Forums To Drive Hundreds of Thousand of Readers to Your Blog” was a bit long and so I settled on a steering wheel with “Readers” across the front of it.
After reading the article a couple of times, I then identified my basic ordering ideas. This would act as the main topics for my mind map. The great thing about mind mapping on-line articles is that they are usually already split into sections or are in the format of a list. This makes it easy to know what your main topics are going to be on your mind map.
At this point I had an initial layout of the mind map. Here you could move things around if you want, before you add associated keywords to each topic.
Expanding Topics
On the second iteration I expanded each topic by adding keywords from each section that were associated with the main topic. As a rule of thumb I did try to stick with a single keyword per branch, but I faltered on this on the “Write” branch. I try to stick with single keywords per branch, but the maximum I would ever use on a branch is two keywords.
At this point I also added images to branches where I thought they needed them to convey more information or just to add fun to the mind map.
On my final iteration of the mind map, I add colour to each branch by simply going over all my pencil markings. Finally I just take an eraser to the paper to take those pencil markings that are showing up.
Done!
After a few iterations at the mind map, I had all the key ideas sorted out in a way that I could easily read. Starting from the “Identify” branch, the mind map follows the key ideas from the article through to the “Be” branch, which acts as a summary. All in this process from reading the articles to final mind map took just under an hour.
Got any comments you care to make on the map? Any areas you like or don’t like? Maybe you also like the article at ProBlogger, but your looking for a more condensed form to follow. Would you use this mind map as a guide to drivers readers to your blog?
Related Articles:
- Tips On Mind Mapping What You Read From The Web
- What are The Essential Ingredients Of A Mind Map?
- The Posting Rhythm Mind Map
- Mind Map Recipe: Mind Mapping a Book
Paul Foreman on December 15th, 2008
Excellent map Matthew…thanks for sharing.
Love the central image and the content is very helpful too.
I also like the idea of Mapping online content – look forward to seeing more Maps from you.
Regards
Paul