Pen down your ideas in a Mind Map

Posted by Fadzuli

July 29, 2008

Last Saturday I had only one blogging student, so we had to change the class venue to the office. So with the projecters and borrowed laptop we proceeded at the Peck Seah office.

Well teaching one student was easy. It took me to only 1.5 hours to teach a 4 hour lesson. So I had like 2.5 hours to go and I had to think of something on the spot. So I took this time to cover more on the “niches” and to explore her strengths, weaknesses, the opportunities & threats..basicly the SWOT technique that Hafihz covered. Identifying this would allow you to have some thought on your eventual blog topics.

Left her for 30 mins to sribble her thoughts. 30 mins later, she decided that she wanted to write about cookies.. So then we began to go further and probe questions like:

1) What cookies are you talking about?
2) Can you write a lot about cookies?
3) How many blogs are there writing about cookies?
4) Is this really your passion?

and many more..

So all this thoughts were written down…

Then we move into the topics of cookies that she can write. I decided to use the Mind Map method..so we came out with a few topics. From there we started to branch out. Hmm ok I should have taken a pic of the Map.

Examples of a single branch.

Cookies -> Type of Cookies - > Oreo -> Made by who -> Ingredients -> Secrets that you might personally know-> Halal or Not?

Cookies -> Home baked -> Why different? -> Where to buy the supplies? -> What are the tools needed? -> How to bake the cookies

Honestly the list is endless. You can just keep going and you will realise that there are tons of things to write. We manage to have 6 branches and that alone already filled up the whiteboard. Some of the ideas are inter-related.

This is a systematic approach to getting ideas out. So if you have no idea what to write for your next post, try this approach. It helps!!