In part one of using the practice or method of mind mapping for our blog expansion I covered a few beginning steps to always keep in the back of your head and the start of building your blog. We start by brainstorming and then organizing all the thoughts to reality. Now, in part two today I want to continue and tell you how I have used mind mapping for building my blogs and making smart mistakes. We’re getting into the “meat and potatoes” now. Are you prepared and ready?
If you have not read part one please do so to get the full benefit of part two.
Quick Review
1. Brainstorming + Organizing Thoughts
Brainstorming is where we dig deep into our passion, purpose, and start thinking about the intial workings of our expansion. This is where you grab a piece of paper, a whiteboard, or use some software such as MindNode for Mac users.
Organizing All Those Thoughts (Reality)
The time has come now to organize all of these thoughts or ideas you’ve brainstormed. Organize them in terms of reality and the true you.
Here is where you refer back to those beginning steps I previously talked about and these same steps are going to help you throughout the whole mind mapping process. Remember we are out to make smart mistakes while expanding your blog.
Continue to read part two (steps two and three).
Beginning the mind map practice is easy. You start with your blog name as the main node/block, then think of things such as the following to add to your mind map (sections):
- Post Categories
- Social Networking Communities
- Ways of Promotion
- Goals
- Products / How to Make Money
These are just a few things I’ve come up with but should surely be considered into being apart of your mind map and blog expansion. Remember to think about the obvious parts of your blog that should be apart of any expansion. After you have considered some of these and/or your own to your mind map the real fun and work begins for building your blog.
2. Breaking It All Apart
Now, we’re going to break the main sections of your mind map (figured about above) apart to make certain that you don’t kill your blog.
Analyze Your Sections
A basic mind map is put together by staring with your node (in this case your blog name). We then create sections from that which are the things you have previously defined to be apart of your blog for the expansion process. Well, from these sections begins the deep analyzation of how and where you want your blog to go.
Ask yourself, “where you want your blog to go”?
For instance, say you want to make money with your blog and to do so you want to create a product. Remember this product is just one of your several sections and focusing on this section is just as important as every other one (all working together).
Think about everything that you want in your product. What role does it play? How will it help and attract the community you have built and/or want? Will this product be one that is used to urge your community to promote your and your blog? Will this product be an introduction to another product you have in the works? All of these are a few questions that a “simple” product plays in expanding your blog. You just need to show it on your mind map.
Immediate Action
Now, that you have your sections all analyzed, it’s time for immediate action on them.
Trust me this could take some time and thought. But, its important and worth it as I wish I would have done this with my previous blogs.
In all sections think about the needed steps to reach whatever you have planned or visioned for each each. Then analyze and rank those steps to the importance and impact each one will make on building your blog for each section. These are the steps for immediate action. Don’t worry about the others right now. It’s time to build, get going, and start making those smart mistakes I’ve been talking about.
Think, Conquer, and Implement
It gets even more interesting. Break down those immediate action steps even further. What will it take for me to accomplish this today, tomorrow, and this week? Ask yourself this and keep pushing for more steps, analyzation, and deeper thoughts under each immediate action step you’ve decided on. We’ve got to conquer these steps that form the initial beginning of our blog in order to expand.
Last thing with all these steps is you can’t just leave them hanging in the thought process.
You need to implement them. If you don’t implement you won’t know your smart mistakes. Don’t want to expand or not?
3. Keep Looking Back to Keep Moving Forward
If you don’t implement you should not worry about reading the rest of this post. I strongly believe that making mistakes and building off them creates one of the best ways for success. I’ve personally experienced it (why I believe it), but I’m not at the point of success yet. We all are bound to make mistakes, but we are better if we can point them all out and go forward.
Know Your Mistakes
These mistakes could be the wrong steps you took for immediate action or what kind of sections you came up with for your blog. Read back through this post and think about the “what if” scenario and really anything could be a mistake. Everything is prone to a mistake, just know yours.
Build Off Your Mistakes
Knowing is half the battle. After knowing think about what happened and what you need to improve on or do differently. This is called building off your mistakes and you can’t build your blog without doing this.
How have you built off your mistakes? Any case studies?
Return to the Map and Keep Editing
Finally, return to the map you initially created. Use it as a historical but ongoing path of your blog’s development and expansion. Mark the mistakes and always be editing the map for a smart expansion for you and your blog.
Please know that this would be greatly helpful when used when starting your blog, but it can be implemented at anytime 
Photo by Lisa Bettany
The Discussion
Leave a Comment Read Again?Hey thanks, these are some great tips. I agree that it’s important to be cognizant of having a plan for your blog. My recent blog is a health and fitness blog network site, yet most of the traffic seems to come from blogging tips though it’s not the primary focus of the network. I’ll have to rethink my approach to the primary cateogry.
You’re welcome Jay. It might just be how you are outreaching for traffic and just spending too much time on blogging tip sites. But, its good you came this time
Nice one Derek. I truly agree with the part about mistakes!
Thanks! Hopefully you make smart mistakes.
I just knew I was going to read something great when I read the heading…and MAN was I right
It’s only great when you actually apply it to your own blog/site. Wish you the best!
Really great tips Derek,
Analyzing your sections is really very important because it gives you insight into some things.
Thanks a lot for the nice comment,
-Onibalusi
Onibalusi,
You’re very welcome. Hopefully you have created a mind map or two
Best,
Derek
Hey Derek,
Another awesome dude. Really Very Useful.
You’re really doing great Job here. Keep up the fantastic work.
Thanks for sharing this great post.
~Dev
Hey Dev,
I’m only do my job if you do your job of taking what I say and applying it somehow.
Best,
Derek
It’s really important to keep organised blogging, its so easy to set out with the intention of doing one thing on your blog, and then getting sidetracked off into doing something else. That’s one of the major challenges, but hopefully doing a mind map like you mentioned will help us achieve what we set out to do, rather than ending up on facebook…..
Robert, we can surely get away from our original focus or intentions of our blog. And usually when we do our community starts to get confused and well we will figure out what we did wrong way later down the road. Mind mapping will surely help us notice the mistakes right away.
Best,
Derek
“BUILD OFF YOUR MISTAKES
Knowing is half the battle. After knowing think about what happened and what you need to improve on or do differently. This is called building off your mistakes and you can’t build your blog with out doing this.”
This part is so true – I think we should spend some time focusing on our mistakes so that we can make sure we don’t make them again, but also to see which mistakes actually turned out to be successes that we would want to repeat!
Clare, building off our mistakes is sometimes hard but if we do it we only become better. I say this because many people see their mistakes and then re-question their whole site/blog and what they are really doing. I guess this also might be something that comes up and we’d have to work with.
Best,
Derek
i totally agree with you dude,,,this awesome
So what sort or mistakes have you built off of? Wish you the best!
To keep on editing the map is vital to the success of these activities. That’s the only way that you know that you are working towards improving your blog from your mistakes and it can help you to keep your blog on the path to greatness!
Plus, it can also make sure that your blog is on track to becoming more successful in completing the goals you’ve set with the map.
Jasmine, you’ve got it! You have a mind map made?
Best,
Derek
I recently started using mind mapping to help set some of my blog related projects into a more organized and visual experience. I’m using a free software app for my Mac called Freemind that I got on freemind.sourceforge.net.
But I was lost when I first started using it, but found some great tutorials on the PersonalBrain.com site. They have free mind mapping software too, but it’s a limited features version. Still the tutorials are excellent when it comes to explaining how to use mind mapping software of any kind.
These posts are really great starting points too. Excellent job of pointing out the real potential for becoming a more organized and creative blogger.
Joella,
I’m so very glad that you are finding great use out of mind maps. They really do help if used right and effectively. I hope many bloggers out there will find what you’ve been noticing.
Wishing you the best,
Derek
Interesting stuff, Impressed
Your blog is awesome and You share great content dude, keep rocking !
You should thank Alex on Twitter @afrais
I’ve heard a lot about this mind-mapping.. Apparently, I’ve been doing it without knowing it had a name..
My background is house building.. And, before I broke ground on a house, I had to do a lot of ‘mapping’, so the process was relatively smooth once the work began. When I moved from house building to web building.. or I should say “web BUSINESS building”.. I found myself doing the same thing.
I like to get out paper and play around with different sections and categories and parts to the site that:
A) I think are important to the site concept.
B) Are important to my visitor.
Probably not in that order!
I also find that my mapping changes as my site evolves.
I plan to dive into your suggestions because I think implementing your mind mapping can take my site to a whole new level.
Dee
Dee,
I’m so happy that you already use mind mapping! The revisiting and editing process of the mind map over time is prolly the most important part to expand your blog. But, really the best thing is just to begin start mind mapping.
I wish you the best!
Best,
Derek
I think all of my mistakes were the smart mistakes, because in my opinion all of the mistakes we did is useful for our future.
That’s good! Creating a mind map insures you keep doing this.
Another Great Post Derek you are so kind and you’re great blogger too my brain disk is caching crawling and indexing this interesting blog with regular updates.
I appreciate the kind words.
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