How to Easily Develop Ideas and Content for Your E-Book

In his excel­lent book, Moon­light­ing on the Inter­net, Yanik Sil­ver explains the great idea of using a Mind Map to develop con­tent for your e-book (or other infor­ma­tion prod­uct) that you want to sell.

First start with your core idea and then branch out related ideas pic­to­ri­ally to map your ideas graphically.

To make your own Mind Map, check out the free­ware soft­ware called Free­Mind avail­able at Source­Forge.  I have posted a video tuto­r­ial here as well.  The tuto­r­ial is more ori­ented toward Eng­lish papers, but it is very nice for build­ing Mind Maps for infor­ma­tion prod­ucts to money as well.

Google has a great tool called Won­der Wheel that is very help­ful for build­ing Mind Maps as well.  To get to Google’s Won­der Wheel, do a Google search on your topic, click on the “Show Options” link, and then click on “Won­der wheel”.

As you click on links in the Won­der Wheel, you see related ideas branch­ing out, sim­i­lar to a Mind Map.  This is incred­i­bly help­ful as you build your Mind Map of related top­ics and subtopics for your infor­ma­tion prod­uct idea.

In his book, Yanik has an exam­ple of using a mind map to show “How to be a Clown for Fun and Profit”, cre­at­ing a dia­gram sim­i­lar to the travel check­list described above.  Here is an out­line that I assem­bled from the Clown Mind Map in the book:

1. Tech­niques
   1. Your clown character
   2. Choos­ing a clown name
   3. Tricks and fun
      1. Squirt­ing flower
      2. DVD: How to cre­ate Bal­loon Ani­mals (Bonus)
      3. Face Painting
2. Rolodex
   1. Where to get floppy shoes
   2. Tal­ent agencies
3. Mar­ket­ing
   1. Con­tract points
   2. Birth­day parties
   3. Cor­po­rate gigs
4. Bonus
   1. Learn­ing from the masters
   2. Inter­views with suc­cess­ful clowns

Yanik says it took him about 5 min­utes to gen­er­ate his Mind Map dia­gram even though he does not know much about clowns.  I don’t doubt it did not take him long, since the human brain is “wired” to think pic­to­ri­ally like a Mind Map.

Mak­ing the out­line above from his dia­gram in the book was also very easy, tak­ing me 5 min­utes to do.  Now, build­ing your E-book con­tent is straight­for­ward since you have already built the plan of your infor­ma­tion product.

What a great way to make your infor­ma­tion prod­uct a reality!

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