Brainstorming Techniques

by John Stiles

Creating a successful internet marketing business requires good brainstorming techniques. The ability to brainstorm ideas and get those ideas out on the internet will separate you from the rest of the competition.

Lately I’ve written some articles here about the use of mind maps for your marketing business. Let’s face it, there are many powerful ways to use mind maps in your business. Once you know all the mind mapping techniques that the most successful marketers use, everything you do becomes easier.

Brainstorming for Internet Marketing ideas

There are nearly as many ways to brainstorm ideas as there are people. I’ve used quite a few methods with varying degrees of success. Inspiration is all around us, we just need a good way to gather up the ideas, expand on them and put them to use. More about that later, lets talk about inspiration for a bit.

As internet marketers, it helps to get into the minds of the people in your particular market. We can also get a great deal of inspiration just spending time with our families. Attempt to see things through the eyes of others.

Marketing inspired by family

Marketing inspired by family

Our grandchildren are a great source of inspiration for me. Imagine expanding the circle of influence. Our grandchildren have friends and their friends have parents. We can learn about markets that are hot in a wide range of interests.

For our brainstorming exercise, make mental notes of hot products or jot them down in a notepad or journal. We’ll use these ideas later. When you get out with family and friends, just have your eyes open for marketing ideas.

Catching a hot trend is a great way to expand into many new markets. Opportunities are everywhere, we just have to gather them up and put them to use.

Brainstorming with a mastermind group

Mastermind groups are great for hashing out the many marketing ideas we come up with. Just beware that a group of internet marketers in a mastermind can become biased on what is hot or what will work in a business. As internet marketers, we tend to see things much differently than the rest of the world.

Having a solid group of differing personalities and skills in your mastermind will surely improve results. Tossing around ideas and digging into the possibilities is generally always better done with others.

Getting those brainstorming ideas out of your head

Marketing Ideas Inside

Marketing Ideas Inside

So what do we do with all these ideas we’ve gathered up? We’ve gone out with family and friends, observed hot trends, listened to the conversations and accumulated a list of ideas.

We’ve also had some discussions with our mastermind group. Perhaps we’ve hashed out some of the ideas or even come up with some new ones.

Our lists of ideas have grown with many ideas to choose from, perhaps these ideas are in different formats too. From ideas in our heads, lists on scraps of paper, notes in journals. Taking these brainstorming ideas and expanding on them can be a real pain, at least it used to be.

Brainstorming techniques using mind maps

Using mind maps to expand on our gathered ideas is an extremely powerful method to turn our ideas into products or new businesses. While I knew there were powerful techniques for using mind maps in many aspects of an marketing business. I recently had my world turned upside down, when I saw how the guru marketers do it.

There is a new mind mapping and business productivity course that explains it all in great detail. The real secrets to how the marketing gurus use mind maps are now available to all of us. No longer will these secret techniques be used against us to kick our asses in internet marketing!

Michael Tipper deserves a round of applause for making these well guarded secrets available in his mind mapping course. The kicker is that he put together a course that puts many of those expensive courses to shame. Michael has put a great deal of detail into this course, videos and manuals are provided for every module. He also made it so affordable, anyone at any level can now have access to the secrets of the top gurus.

Even the bonuses compliment the course

Michael has really thought through what he wanted to cover in his mind mapping course. All the bonuses included are a great fit and really enhance the entire package. Don’t let the low price fool you, the quality of training provided is usually quite expensive.

My impression is that Michael went out of his way to make this affordable to everyone. A real marketer who is genuinely trying to help people. All we need to do now is apply what Michael teaches and we have a real road map to success.

Thank you Michael Tipper! You’ve opened the world of the gurus to everyone.

John Stiles

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Internet Marketing Ideas

by John Stiles

What does a good internet marketing idea look like? See below for the kinds of looks I get for some of my business ideas.

A few Google searches on the topic of marketing ideas and you open up a world with many directions. This only serves to overload you with too many directions and too many marketing ideas to ponder. The lack of precise focus on a solid direction will only slow down the growth of any internet marketing business.

In a recent article - Mind Mapping Internet Marketers. We discussed some of what the most successful internet marketing gurus do to get to the top of their game. They use the power of mind mapping to manage and grow their business empire.

Mind mapping Internet Marketing Ideas

One of the power processes for mind mapping is the ability to brainstorm ideas. Randomly enter all your internet marketing ideas without editing your thoughts. Then these ideas can easily be organized into a mind map that allows you to dig deeper into each idea. Some ideas fit together and others don’t really fit at all.

Putting all business marketing ideas into a well organized mind map is a great way to weed out the crap. Narrowing down business ideas to get to the very best course of action helps us to focus on what is important to our business growth.

Creating a marketing mastermind group

A great way to hash out ideas is through a mastermind group. Small tight knit masterminds generally work best. I’ve also found that it is a great benefit to have members with different talents. Our group has experience with graphics, video, wordpress, writing, marketing and traffic generation, among many other experiences.

Listen close to marketing ideas

Listen close to marketing ideas

When discussing internet marketing ideas with your mastermind group, it’s important to listen to the ideas that are presented.

Giving full attention to others in your group only adds to the gains made through masterminds. If you have the ability to have local meetings, you can gain some added insights when you see the look on the face of people listening to your marketing ideas.

As you can see from the picture shown, my youngest mastermind member shows a genuine interest in the ideas being presented.

The look that says you are presenting a really bad idea is quite different. Men know what I’m talking about, you know the look! Women should be proud of their ability to shoot a look at us without saying a word, but the meaning is known. The look that says your idea sucks, without saying anything.

So what does a good internet marketing idea look like?

Once a good idea is found by narrowing things down with mind mapping, getting feedback from your marketing coach or hashing the idea out in a mastermind. The general tone changes, you can sense when you are on to something based on the energy of those discussing the ideas.

The discussion intensifies and the marketing idea starts to take shape. Hammering out the details with others can enhance a good idea, exposing additional ways to make the idea even better. Take all these added inputs and add them to your mind map for even further refinement.

Reactions to Marketing Ideas

Reactions to Marketing Ideas

The look on the face of someone hearing a good idea can be priceless.

Although there are times when it is difficult to tell if the looks you get for your ideas are looks of fear or excitement. My little marketing buddy is actually quite excited about the ideas being discussed.

Hashing out ideas is all part of the game. Using all the tools at your disposal will help to shorten the time it takes to find the really good ideas and then run with them.

Mapping out all your ideas in a mind map is a great way to narrow your focus. While mind mapping is a good tool and should be something we all use.

The feedback you get from your marketing coach or mastermind group is where your ideas either sink or swim. The added feedback you get from seeing the reactions is pure gold. Once you find a great idea and run with it, the niche marketing customers will have the final say. The real judge for any idea is the consumer. When a really good idea hits the market, customers will spread the word. When customers spread the word about your products and ideas, then you know what a really good idea looks like.

John Stiles

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Mind Map Marketing

by John Stiles

WordPress marketing sites made easy with mind maps

Mind mapping makes simple to complex tasks easier by organizing everything in a logical manner. With the popularity of Word Press, managing multiple niche marketing sites becomes simple with mind maps. This mind map marketing article will expand on some of the ways that using mind maps can help make our internet marketing projects easier.

With so many little details that go into creating a WordPress marketing site, having all the steps laid out assures that nothing is left to chance. Most of us don’t set up new sites on a daily basis, we work on existing sites. Then when we go to start a new site, some of the things we did in creating our other sites can get lost along the way.

Using Mind Maps to track your work

Mind Mapping WordPress

Mind Mapping WordPress

Every little detail that goes into building a word press marketing site can be entered into your mind map. With all the steps you need to take, in one easy to use location.

Experimenting with marketing ideas or site ideas is more efficient too. Have you ever wanted a specific function in your site and set out to look for a plug in to do it? When I have wanted to add a word press plug in and went searching the internet or the plug in directory at the official WordPress Plugins site.

There can be dozens of plug ins that seem to do the same thing. Typically, I may try many different plugins to get the functionality I’m looking for.

Having mind maps to enter notes on all the different settings used or things we try makes life a whole lot easier when we go on to start a new site. Even if something didn’t work right, noting it in your mind map will prevent wasting time on it again. It’s difficult to remember all the details. Pop these important notes into your mind map and save time with each new marketing site you build.

Mind map steps to entire business plans

As you can see from the above example mind map, everything can be broken down into easy to manage steps. In the case of word press niche marketing sites, everything from niche ideas to site projects can put in your mind maps. All nice and neat in one place with the ability to find everything in a few clicks.

From niche marketing with WordPress to pay per click on Google or any other traffic source, mind maps can save an enormous amount of time. You also have the ability to attach other files to any of your mind maps. Spread sheets, documents, folders or websites can be referenced in mind maps.

In other words, simple business processes to the complex business enterprise can be done easier when mind maps are used. The key to all of it is the ease of use. If things are a pain to do and follow through on, then it is likely that we won’t want to do it.

Easy depends on the mind mapping software

There are quite a few choices when it comes to mind map software. From Free Mind which is open source and free to use. Or using Mindjet Mind Manager, which carries a one time cost to buy it. Plus many others in between. For ease of use, my preference is Mindjet, plus that is the one that most of the successful internet marketers use. The choice is yours, for me it’s easier to be on the same system as the gurus. I look at it as an investment in my sanity and my business.

Taking it beyond business use, I also like to use mind maps for the courses I buy too. It makes it easier to find everything when you need it. Picture having a course that is mostly videos, you want to find the stuff you can put into action without watching all the videos again? Just create a mind map of the course and the videos with references to the video and the times. You’ll be able to review and put into action anything in any training course with ease!

If all this seems complicated, it’s really not. It’s quite easy to create mind maps like the internet marketing masters. Stick around, we’ll cover more mind mapping insights soon. If you like the potential of using mind maps in your business and found these articles to be helpful, feel free to post your questions or comments below.

John Stiles

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Mind Mapping Internet Marketers

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