Ben Roy

I remember the first time I saw a mind map. It was at the office and we were doing some kind of brainstorming exercise (around what, I can't recall, maybe testing?) and someone was manually capturing it in the form of a mind map. Then someone pulled up some mind mapping software and used it to record the information. It seemed pretty cool, but I didn't spend a lot of time doing brainstorming.

Fast forward to now, and it's a much more relevant topic. I do a fair amount of idea generation with people about business ideas, marketing plans, etc. Plus I've realized that there are many ways I can leverage mind maps to organize and control information.

I use FreeMind for all my mind maps. It's an open source tool (read: free) that does a pretty good job of letting you get your work done without getting in the way too much. It's not perfect, but it's adequate and the price is right. You can get it here: FreeMind.

Lately I've found that it's my favorite way to map out a business. The result is very easy to digest, easy to reorganize, and easy to run through many iterations. You can start by just dumping everything straight from your head onto the page. However things seems to fit together is fine; group nodes up in the best ways possible.

Once you have everything down the fun part starts. Come at things from the more practical side. What elements do you know you'll need? What are your products, what does your content look like, what site or sites make up the business, what about mailing lists? Impose some structure on the raw data. I like to throw in some icons to denote certain node types (books for products, houses for websites, magnifying glass for search terms), but anything that doesn't fit a mold I just leave as is.

I also like to model some processes - the sales funnel being a classic example. What does the pitch look like, what are you selling, what are you throwing in, what does the user see when they click to buy, what kind of upsell/cross sell/OTO/continuity are you pitching?

Keywords lend themselves very naturally to mind maps as well. Find the big 'hub' type keywords and then fill in the smaller words that fit around them. It makes it easy to focus on creating mini-authority around those words that have more competition. This is another place where I use icons to mark keywords that are particularly juicy - low competing pages, non-optimized competition, etc.

The result all of this is a slowly evolving and increasingly complete picture of a business. You can collapse nodes to get the executive summary, or expand them all out to see all the details. Every time I have a new idea, I throw it on wherever it fits, or just in a parking lot if I can't categorize it.

It makes it very easy to see what you're working towards, and enables you to dive deep with business partners, coaches, or students. If you aren't leveraging mind maps, do yourself a favor and check out FreeMind or some other mind mapping tool. You'll be glad you did.