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Mapping A Blueprint For Success
By Robin Porter
©2004 All Rights Reserved
Any experienced Internet entrepreneur will tell you that promotion is the lifeblood of his business. The more you promote your website, the better your chance of success, or to coin a phrase "throw enough mud at the wall and some will stick"!
I would like to share a technique with you that will help you come up with a promotion and marketing routemap for your website, which you can then regularly follow. It is based on the technique of "mind mapping" which you may have heard of or already be familiar with.
Mind Mapping is a creative way of putting ideas down on paper, and can be used to solve problems (like "brainstorming"). It was said to be inspired by the man widely recognised as the worlds greatest ever genius - Leonardo Da Vinci - who had a distinctive way of recording his notes on paper. It's advantages are that it produces more balanced thinking, drawing on both sides of the brain, increasing creativity and producing more creative results in less time. One of the reasons for this is that the way mindmaps are drawn mimics the way individual nerve cells communicate within the brain.
So, how do you produce a mindmap? First, you need a blank sheet of paper.
1) Start with the main idea or problem in the middle, in this case promoting your website, and doodle a symbol or image to depict it (doodling helps the creativity flow). Just take a few moments to do this - it doesn't matter how messy it looks!
2) The aim is to put down all ideas related to the subject, so start with the obvious ones that are already in your head, in this case search engines, newsgroups etc. Write these down, and connect them to the main symbol with lines.
3) You will find many ideas have sub -ideas. For example, from search engines, you could have branches for paid search engines, doorway pages etc. Ideas tend to lead to ideas -write down anything, however impractical it may be -don't dismiss anything at this stage.
4) In turn sub-ideas might sprout smaller ideas. For example, paid search engines might spawn individual ones such as goto.com or rocketlinks.com.
5) Continue in a kind of brainstorming fashion, recording any ideas that come into your head -we'll worry about how feasible they are later.
6) Once you've spent some time on your mind map, and have found the ideas have dried up, leave it and come back to it later. Review it and see if any new ideas jump out at you.
You should eventually be left with a somewhat messy doodle, full of ideas to promote your website. It should look something like this: a central concept in the middle, with related ideas all radiating out from it, and other ideas in turn sprouting off like the branches from a tree. You can redraw it now into a neater version, leaving out the totally impractical ideas.
It's difficult to do justice to the art of mind mapping in a short article like this, so you might wish to find out more from one of the many books or websites on the subject. If you followed the above, you should now have a graphic description of ways to promote your website. Keep it handy or hang it on your office wall, and refer to it regularly. You will find it to be a useful blueprint to follow, enabling you to systematically and regularly promote your website, and in turn, get those visitors coming.
ROBIN PORTER
(CEO RP Associates)
You can get many free tools for promoting your website and succeeding
online, from http://www.theinternetmarketingwizards.com/index.htm?art1309
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