Website Creation Rule #1: Think First

I have to admit: I've used mind mapping software for years. And yet, when I decided to create a website for my freelance writing business, the first thing I did was try to come up with a good home page headline.

Strong words are vital to a home page--any home page. But what makes a site work is the overall design and navigation, and the content you provide to visitors.

So the second thing I did was to open up a ConceptDraw MINDMAP and start figuring out what I wanted on my site. Here are the general areas I broke my site into:

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn't presenting myself the way I wanted to be seen by potential customers. The two main things I specialize in are developing strategies that help companies get noticed, and creating content--all kinds of content. Very often, the strategy involves content creation. But not always. So I keep them separate:

So now I have the basic skeleton of what I want my website to communicate. I'll post again soon (I'm not going to commit to tomorrow just in case...) on how to use MINDMAP to capture and organize in one place all the content and links you're going to need for your site.

A Better Way to Manage PR Campaigns Part 2

In the first post on this issue, I was discussing how to use MINDMAP to organize your media targets. The nice thing about the map is that you can have all of the ways to contact or follow them on one screen. You may have other places, such as Hootsuite, to follow people in social media.

But sometimes you want to just jump right in and see what a reporter is tweeting about right that instant. The map format makes that easy to do:

You'll notice on that you can also add the pitch you're going to use for each reporter, the subsequent email correspondence you have with them, and the ultimate outcome--either a link to the published article, or the dreaded "thumbs down."

And when the campaign is finished, you can copy and paste each reporter's branches to your main Media Contact map to continue building a history of your relationship with that particular person. More on this later.

A Better Way to Manage PR Campaigns

I suppose that many of you, like me, wear more than one hat in the course of a working week. One of my hats is doing public relations. I love to find companies that are doing something great, but that don't know how to get out there and tell their stories. It is the writer in me that helps communicate what a company is all about--without it sounding like some kind of cheesy brochure.

But PR isn't a one-off thing: It's a process. It's about creating a plan, then executing the plan. And PR plans, like most plans are complex. There are a lot of dependencies. Mind mapping helps me merge my creative, writerly brain with my organizational brain.

There are a lot of moving pieces to the typical pr plan, so I thought I'd make a few short blogs about it so you can see how ConceptDraw MINDMAP helps me work quickly and creatively on behalf of my clients.

PR success is all building strong relationships with influencers, and in having clear, compelling stories to tell. To build strong relationships, you have to understand the reporter--and keep track of your communications with them. Here's how I do it.

I have a set of maps where I keep my media contacts (I pull them from a media database I subscribe to). Every time I start a new campaign, I pull from that the names and info of the reporters I hope to work with on the campaign. The map looks something like this (though this map is very simplified):

I'm trying to keep these posts short, so I'll end it here. Tomorrow I'll talk about capturing your pr brainstorming.

Roger Parker Maps The Brand of You

Double-whammy: Roger Parker at 7 writing tips for personal brand building success not only offers some great advice on personal branding, but he suggests mindmapping as a good way to help you put that advice into practice.

If you aren't aware of Roger Parker, you should be. He is a veritable gold mine of how-tos, lists, tricks, and just plain gool ol' advice for writers of all stripes.

It can be hard for some writers (like me, for example) to think of myself as a brand. It all seems like so much uber-marketing. I think, in retrospect, that I became a bit of a known commodity at one of my previous jobs. I didn't do anything to consciously promote myself as a brand. I was just doing my job, which got me in front of a fair number of people. And I had a certain amount of style.

As a result of that, I got some inkling into how useful it is to have people see your name and immediately feel like they've heard of you--that you're not a complete unknown.

I'm starting a freelance business here in Boise and am already thinking in terms of what I can do locally to put my company on the map. At this stage, it has to do with carefully defining and then promoting my distinct way of doing things--i.e., my "brand."

I've got some ideas about how I want people to perceive me, am looking forward to spread the word about myself--and I have Roger to thank for so freely sharing his knowledge. Thanks, Roger.

A Blog Post That Will Change the Way You Think About Writing

That's a big claim, I know. But I put it out there because I think that a lot of writers are going about thinking and planning in ways that don't support--and may actually hinder--their creative process.

Bear with me and take this simple test:

1. Think of two things you want or need to do... maybe your plans for the coming weekend, a home improvement project, a party you want to have, a vacation you want to take.
2. With a blank sheet of paper before you, take about 5 minutes and make a traditional outline of what you need to do to accomplish one of these things.
3. Now grab a new sheet of paper for the second thing you thought of. But instead of making an outline, try this approach to capturing your thoughts:
• Put the name of the thing you want to do in the center of the page... maybe draw a circle around it.
• Now draw a line out from the center and, at the end of the line, write down one thing you need to do to get the job done.
• Now draw a second line out from the center and, at the end of this line, write down a second idea. Continue this process for 5 minutes. As more ideas come to you, just keep drawing more lines out from the center and writing down ideas at the end of the one.
• As you do this, you might notice that some of the ideas you have are related to ideas you've already written down. If this happens, draw a line not from the center, but from the idea your new thought relates to.
4. Now sit back and look at the two lists. How are they similar? How are they different? Was one list easier to make than the other? Did one method help you generate more ideas?

For many creative people, the process of working with ideas is fluid, with one idea leading to another--and not necessarily in a neat, linear way.

But in my experience, many of these same people use very linear methods like outlines. Why? In many cases, just because they haven't heard of any other way to do it.

Mind mapping can be such a great way to get the ideas out of your mind and onto the page. It's great for everyone who deals with ideas, but it can be especially helpful to writers.

Millenials Buy More Books than Baby Boomers

I ran across an interesting blog today at "How to Market to Me: Your Guide to Getting the Millenial Market.". The blog is owned by a very social media-savvy recent college grad.

The fact behind this particular post is that for the first time, millenials are buying more books than baby boomers. The conjecture is that this is because of the explosion, first, in ereader devices and, second, in ebooks.

When you think about writing, do you immediately think in terms of creating the kind of novel you pull off the bookshelf? Has your thinking about the form in which you write changed as a result of ebooks?

If you are free to publish on line any time you please, have you thought more about releasing a book a chapter at a time? How about taking suggestions from readers as you spin out the story?

3 Keys to Writing 4 Articles About 5 Ways to Succeed

I have spent time lately browsing around to see what kind of business writing tips are available on the web. Pretty flat landscape... IMHO. Blogs are full of clever little articles that follow the hackneyed format of providing X number of tips, tricks, and trivia (8 Ways to Build Your Blog Traffic, 10 Things That Make Great Headlines, 15 Ways to Make Your Team More Team-Like, 297 Ways to Run a Better Meeting).

I've read the studies that say this format generates more traffic. But in my experience after you read five or ten of these, you've pretty much had your fill. I mean, can everything really be reduced to a handful of crisp bullet points?

I was talking to a friend who tweets. I was telling her that it seems like 90% of the tweets I get are much the same--nothing more than armchair philosophizing: "To serve the meal of success one must first taste failure"; "It is only by talking that we truly communicate" and so on... You could sit around all day and make these things up. But she said the sends out a lot of that stuff because people love it. I don't get it.

I'm not saying that blogs or tweets needs to be masterworks of literature. I just think it would be refeshing if people blogged about things they cared about, rather than trying to come up quick and easy ways to "fill a page." It just seems like so many people have blogs because... because they want to be bloggers, I guess.

I'm a writer, and I think it is great when people are moved to put words down on the page. I just think it would be better for all if there was some connection, some emotion in what is being written. Otherwise, we reduce or our common body of thought to a vortex of numbered lists about numbered lists.