The world has seen an increase in content creation as more and more people become creators of written and visual content. Whether you are a blogger, podcaster, or videographer, concept mapping can help you at different stages of content development.
In this article, you will learn how to use a mind map in your content creation.
1. Find the right niche
As a content creator, finding the right niche is extremely important. Especially if you are intending to create content for social media, it is best to select a genre before you start. Use a mind map to locate your preferred niche.
List all the interesting genres and subgenres in a mind map. Besides your interest and expertise, also consider the competition around this niche. As the mind map contains your interests and your competition, it becomes easy to find the right niche.
2. Identify unique topics
In addition to choosing an ideal niche, you should also discover the unique topics for your content. There can be an endless number of topics, but creating or writing content on the most discussed topics is useless, unless you have something new to add.
This is why concept mapping can help you find unique and trending topics for content creation. You can also compare the trending concepts with what you have already covered. If you find a match, it’s time to promote it again or share it with your audience.
3. Brainstorm
Brainstorming is a crucial part of content creation, whether you’re writing a blog, broadcasting a podcast, or creating videos. It allows you to have new ideas for your content and its execution.
In case you didn’t know, mind mapping is the right approach for successful brainstorming sessions. There are tools online that offer out-of-the-box content ideation mind maps like MindMeister, XMind, Lucidchart, etc.
There are many concept mapping tools that enable collaboration. Therefore, several people can think simultaneously and write the idea on the same card. Once done, you can organize the concepts according to topic and subtopics. It is also possible to remove duplicate ideas from a mind map.
4. Creating a contour
After deciding on the topic of your upcoming content, you need to create its outline. There are different description apps available in the market. But, a robust mind mapping app can help you with the highlighting. So, you don’t need to use an outline tool separately.
If you want to create a video of the most popular Mexican food, use a mind map to jot down everything related to the elements, such as the story, recipe, and reviews. Depending on the length of your video, choose what you are going to include in the video.
5. Design an infographic
Infographics are a powerful helping tool to make any blog visually appealing. However, its creation is often a time consuming task. This includes finding data resources, extracting the necessary data by analysis, mock-up and finally creating one using an application.
You can use a mind map to combine all the main points of a blog. Then filter only the critical data for an infographic. Once you’ve found the topics and data for an infographic, you can also use a mind map to organize them by category.
6. Make illustrations
Most bloggers themselves create images and illustrations for their blog posts. Few of them have previous experience in drawing and creating images. As a result, they use the same stock images in all posts, causing audiences to lose interest quickly.
To avoid this situation, you can use different mind mapping features to make your blog visually appealing. You can describe a process or sequence by adding a flowchart-like mind map to your content. A spider-shaped mind map is another way to summarize the main points of the blog or the main takeaways from an interview.
7. Reuse of old content
Reusing content means recycling a top performing blog into different forms. So you can reach a new section of the audience.
You can use a mind map to locate the top performing post or blog for reuse. This map is also useful after selecting a blog, as you can find out how you want to reuse it to get maximum readership.
Also, a mind map will help you identify a new target audience for the repurposed content. It is also beneficial to locate outdated data and irrelevant information in a blog.
8. Planning for content upgrades
For serious content creators, upgrading content is a vital process. This way, you can turn casual readers into regular visitors to your website. Apart from that, you can collect visitors’ email addresses for further content promotion.
Asking your reader to subscribe to newsletters has become too cliché. Instead, you can use a mind map to come up with new leveling ideas. The ideas could allow them to access exclusive content or to share how-to guides or recipes with them.
9. Presentation of the editorial calendar
As a content creator, you should have a content calendar that contains the topics of your blog or video for the days ahead. It’s a good idea to create a social media content calendar at least a month in advance.
With mind mapping, you can jot down any ideas you have for your future content. Then you can sort them using the flexible editing features of the mind mapping tools. With this, you can also decide the topics of each episode for a series of blogs, podcasts or videos.
10. Turn a text script into a video
Mind maps are essential for video content creators. As a videographer, you need to prepare a text script before you start filming. But, a mind map cuts your work down by including all the crucial topics and related issues in an abbreviated form.
Then you can cover all the points in your video by looking at the mind map. You can also use the mind map to ask questions during a video interview.
Use a mind map for eye-catching content
To create popular and rich content, you need to put maximum effort into the content creation process. A mind map is a versatile method that you can use as a content creator to do different things.
To complete the requested tasks, you can use some helpful tips to create a mind map.
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