Using Mind Maps to create Multi-Niche Websites

One of the most common pieces of advice given to novice internet entrepreneurs is to choose a niche in which they are interested in. Many will ignore the advice, and instead target highly paid areas such as insurance, health and law. However, writing about subjects in which they have no interest is not easy, and most will churn out a few low quality articles before giving up. In this article, I shall show users how to use mind maps to build up a set of subjects in which they can write articles. Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo love pages that link together and contain related content. So webmasters who write up several pages of content on a themed topic will have a head start.

Let us start by choosing an example theme. I have interests in financial markets, gambling, web marketing, reading, music and food. The first three interests happen to be highly paid areas.

Finance is a very popular topic on the internet. However, it is full of snake oil, and the useful knowledge that I have is not something that I'd be willing to share publicly.
Gambling topics is highly paid. Like finance, I also have knowledge that I'm not willing to share. Also, Google does not allow Adsense to be displayed on gambling pages.
Anyway, I shall choose to base my example on food. A subject which everyone participates in, and many love. I spend a lot of time thinking about food; what to cook in the evening, where to buy the ingredients, how to improve my latest recipe etc. There is therefore a lot that I can say about it. Also, the fact that I am actively involved in food on a daily basis means that I can write regular articles on the subject. How often does the average person take out a car loan or new home insurance? To assist in my research, I shall use the free Mind Mapping tool from Mindomo (see resources below). The small, incomplete map already has 20 topics. And the blog(s) are things that I could update on a regular basis. 20 interlinked articles on food would give my website a food based theme.

Once completed, the themed site would give me a good base from which to target niche food areas. One easy way to get niche areas is to target a subject and location. For example, if I wanted to target "sushi restaurants", the more specific "sushi restaurants London" would be an easier bet. Also, having pages about multiple sushi restaurant locations would give the search engines pages to feed on. So eventually, I could have pages on sushi restaurants in London, new York, Tokyo etc.

Within these pages, I should be aware of related and similar searches. For example, if I type in "sushi restaurants" into Dawjee.com, a list of more specific searches will be provided. Most of these appear to be location searches. However, at the bottom is "top sushi restaurants". The astute webmaster could easily try to target both areas at once i.e. "top sushi restaurants London". If they do that for 5 locations, then they'll have 5 pages targeting sushi restaurant locations and 5 pages targeting top sushi restaurants. Using a good content management system, such as Drupal these pages would all be interlinked to other related sections from the site, such as the Japanese Cuisine page and eating out blog.

While this example has been performed on a fairly low value niche, the strategy described in this article could easily be employed to build a relative large site about any subject area in which the webmaster has an interest and reasonable level of knowledge.