Exposing Profits on the Web

I’ve gotten several emails recently about using mind mapping to aid in productivity. These have come from top marketers who use it for newsletters or website concepts. You can use mind maps to plan out pretty much everything from cleaning the house to starting a business.

I’ve been using mind maps to get a good handle on what the various types of Internet marketing businesses can look like. There are many different marketing models that will work on the Internet, and many variations of them can be used together. Using a mind map makes it easy to see how things fit together.

Up until now, I’ve been hand drawing my mind maps on white boards. But that is time consuming and a bit difficult to share. It also takes up white board real estate that I could use for something else. So, I started using Free Mind.

Some of the top marketers are recommending MindJet, but let me show you what I created with Free Mind. Here is the collapsed version of my “Website Profit Center Model.”

Basically, I’ve created a simple model here of an Internet profit center. In this case, I’m describing the landscape of the traffic flow into and out of a website profit center. In order to keep it as simple as possible, I’ve decided that I really only have two things going on. Traffic in, and traffic out. I also really only have two types of traffic coming in: traffic I pay to acquire, and traffic that I do not pay to acquire.

For the traffic outflow, there are only two types there as well: traffic that is monetized (earns me money), and traffic that is not monetized.

In reality, there is a lot more going on within and around my profit center than that, so I expand my mind map to include some of the possibilities for both the inflow and outflow of the traffic.

Let me show you what just one portion of the traffic in looks like so far. We’re not done yet, but we’ve got a lot of ideas sparked by the mind mapping exercise…

As you can see, I’ve defined a number of ways to get free traffic. The goal here when we mind map is to get as many ideas out as we can, starting from a simple concept. As you think of items and how they relate to the parent item, it will often spark a related idea that allows you to start a new node. Some of these ideas can grow into totally new mind maps. The possibilities are truly endless.

From here, we can refine our thoughts and create a process map by which we can execute strategies based on our goals. For example, let’s say that we have a goal of achieving 1000 visitors per day for a brand new site within 6 months. We can easily look at our mind map and determine which of the possible methods we want to use to generate those visitors, write out the process, and execute it.

I have found it extremely helpful to mind map. Before I would start an idea file, which is basically a text document. Then I would notice that my ideas in it were all over the place, and it would grow to like 10 pages in length. So I’d start a new file, and then another, and another. Pretty soon, I’ve got a bunch of folders with files in them with all kinds of ideas, and no way to relate them to my overall concept.

Without knowing where or how they fit in, I had no idea how to use them properly. Sometimes, I would draw out process maps, but they would get so cluttered and detailed I would lose focus on how to use them. With the mind mapping concept, you can see from a high level view as far down in detail as you want to go.

When I’ve got my mind map matured just a bit, I plan on exporting it to a PDF file. I’ll make that file available to my newsletter subscribers when it’s ready.

I highly encourage you to try it out for yourself!