Unleash The Power Of Your Brain With Mind Maps

Mind maps may have been invented by a British popular phsychologist and author Tony Buzan. I say "may have" because he claims to have invented it, but others claim he merely coined a new term and elaborated on something people were already doing. Whether he did or didn't invent mind maps, he has certainly done a lot to popularize the method.

A mind map is a very simple graphing tool to help you think. It helps you to visualize, organize, and give shape to your ideas and thoughts, which may include pictures, words, relationships, and associations. When you build a mind map based on a central topic or idea, your thoughts about it become clearer as you build it, and the details of it become easily managable. This is because, says Buzan, mind maps are consistent with the way your mind naturally thinks. That is, your mind thinks in terms of hierarchy, and a radiant structure of associations, rather than in a linear progression of thoughts, such as are represented by traditional outlines.

Mind maps can be used in numerous applications. You can use mind maps to help you:

• Plan a business
• Plan an event
• Analyze a problem
• Brainstorm
• Create a strategy
• Study a concept
• Study an object
• Remember something you already know
• or just play with an idea or group of ideas.

My own observation about mind maps is, they let you treat your idea like a 3-dimensional object, made of many interconnected or interrelated parts, that you can look at from numerous angles and levels of detail. They let you see how all the parts of it are related to each other, and how changing one part of it will affect all the other parts of it. That can give you very powerful insight into very complex ideas, and makes it easier to manipulate them.

Mind maps have opened a whole new stream of creativity for me, for a wide variety of mental/creative tasks, including mechanical and graphic design, building web sites, planning events, or solving business problems. They allow us to tie together logical, analytical, verbal, and visual functions of our brain.

As I mentioned, mind maps are very simple to create. For this demonstration, I decided to make a mind map on the subject of my HubPages revenue, and all the factors that contribute to it. By drawing this mind map, I now have a much clearer idea how to build my HubPages revenue.

I start with one central idea: EARNINGS. This is the focus of my mind map, the objective, something I am trying to achieve.

Then, around that central idea, I place branches representing all the major factors I believe contribute to my HubPages revenue.

Note:

• I choose one word for each branch.
• Each main branch has a different color.
• Add as many images, drawings, photos, or other graphical cues as possible to make the mind map as visually stimulating as possible.

For this mind map, this is what the branches mean:

• To earn revenue on HubPages, you need to develop and submit Content, in the form of hub pages with articles written in them.
• In with that content, you need to set aside locations where sponsors can place their Advertisements.
• You earn revenue when readers see the advertisements and click on them, but first, they have to find your articles - there must be Traffic to your hub pages.
• A small amount of that traffic will just happen without you doing anything beyond just writing and submitting your article. But to get lots of traffic to your pages, you need to be involved in Promoting your pages.
• Another thing that helps bring your pages more traffic is to participate in the HubPages Community. (More on that further down on this page.)

Is that all there is to making money on HubPages? In a nutshell, yes, but as many of us know, there is more to understand about each branch I have created. So now, I add more branches to the ones I added in the last step.

To the Content branch, I added more branches to represent requirements for good, income-producing content. Again, I choose just one word for each branch, whenever possible, but as you can see, there are times when you just have to use more than one.

The new branches show more about what kind of content produces more income. The content should possess genuine Value to readers. The copy must be high-Quality. You can see the other attributes I have attached to the content to describe the content: Depth, Presentation, Integrity, etc.

Now, I add more branches to those to further describe each of them.

Here, I have added more sub-branches to further describe each branch. By now, it should be becoming intuitively obvious what all the new branches represent. These are my ideas of what it means to produce quality, income-producing content. If you were to build your own mind map, you might come up with other ideas about what should go on those branches.

I could keep going with more levels of sub-branches, but in this case, it wouldn't add much meaning to this particular mind map. For example, I could break the grammar branch down further into individual rules of grammar, which would be logical enough, but not really do much help me understand how to build my revenue stream. It's sufficient just to say you need good grammar.

Now I add more branches to all the other main branches.

This shows the entire mind map, including some relationships I added between items in different sections of the map. I'll explain those a little further down the page.

I realize this is a little difficult to see in much detail, so I've added some zoomed views of the map to show specific areas of it.

To the Advertising branch, I added concerns about making sure the advertising is well laid-out in my hub page, and I have chosen advertising that is relevant to my topic.

The Community branch is a fairly complex animal. In order to be successful on HubPages, I can see a relationship between our contribution to the success of others and to the HubPage community as a whole, and our own success as authors. This comes back to us, not so much in direct revenue, but by helping to build a thriving site that is generally favorable to more traffic. We also build our own reputation within the community, which comes back to us in more traffic from within the HubPages domain, and also creates more credibility with our site visitors referred from anywhere else.

So how do I show this in my mind map? I do this by adding branches that show what we receive, versus what we contribute. Then draw a relationship line back to my Traffic branch. More about relationship lines further down.

The branches I added to the Promoting branch break down into different venues available for promoting my content. Two of the branches I added are to note methods of promoting my HubPage content that I should not use, because they are prohibited by HubPages. So I added little time bomb images with exclamation marks to indicate they should be carefully and conscientiously avoided.

For the Traffic branch, I have added sub-branches to represent actions I can take to make my pages more delectable to the search engines. This includes things like making keyword research a part of the process of choosing my topics, and making sure my articles contain tags that are relevant search terms.

I have also added branches to show the need for active promotion of my hub pages.

Notice that there are several lines that go between branches in different sections, that show another kind of relationship between them. For example:

• The keyword research is mainly about attracting site traffic. But the result of that research affects what you put into your content, perhaps even what topics you write about.
• Link-building is also a big part of actively drawing traffic to your web pages, but that is mostly handled through your active promoting efforts.

What you can see from this completed mind map is really just my own personal concept of how earning income with HubPages works. With this object I have created, I can play with different approaches and possibly be able to predict the outcome. Or I may realize I was wrong about a particular assumption I made, and re-arrange the branches to reflect my new assumptions.

A mind map you create on the exact same subject could be completely different from mine, depending on your own concept and understanding of the subject.

Now that you've made it through the demo, it's your turn to try making your own mind map. Here are some ideas for simple ones to try. Make a mind map about...

• what you think teamwork is.
• one of your favorite fiction characters.
• something you are trying to learn to do.
• the plot of your favorite movie.
• an airplane.
• ideas for your next vacation.

When I first started using mind maps, I just got a quadrile-lined notepad and a bunch of colored pencils. That is still a fun way to make them. But now there are several software programs that make mind maps very easy to create and modify. Here is a list of some free programs you can just download:

• XMind - this is my personal favorite, and the one I used to make the illustrations for this article.
• FreeMind
• FreePlane

Don't forget to have fun with this! ■