5 Mind Maps to Boost Your Podcast’s Thought Leadership Potential

Welcome back to the final blog post of my three-part series on mind mapping for your new podcast. We’ve covered a lot of ground so far. My first article explored how MindMeister can help you establish the “3 P’s” of Podcasting — Purpose, Process and Production — while my second explained the “Podcasting M&Ms” of Marketing and Monetization. In this final post, we’ll examine ways to establish yourself as a thought leader with podcasting and look closely at the mind maps that can help you get the job done.

5 Mind Maps to Boost Your Podcast’s Thought Leadership Potential

Hello again! If you haven’t yet read my other two postsThe 6 Mind Maps You Need to Start a Podcast in 2021 and Promoting and Optimizing Your Podcast With Mind Mapping — my name is Espree Devora, also known as the Girl Who Gets It Done. I started podcasting in 2013 and quickly reached the top of the charts on Apple podcasts. My shows, Women in Tech and WeAreLATech, have been featured on the homepage of major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Castos, and I’ve even been featured in huge publications like Harper’s Bazaar and Entrepreneur Magazine.

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The Road to Thought Leadership

Firstly… What even is thought leadership? Well, the term is used in many different ways, but essentially it’s a marketing strategy in which you use your expertise to answer important questions for your audience or even address topics they haven’t even thought about yet. In podcasting, it happens quite often organically: amateur enthusiasts are more inclined to create podcasts about topics they are knowledgeable about and can often accumulate huge audiences by doing so.

Maybe it was the same for you. Many people get into podcasting not for commercial reasons, but because they want to get their message heard, although the two essentially go hand in hand. Once you’ve got your audience, actually promoting yourself and your products is a lot easier. The first step, establishing yourself as a thought leader, can be a daunting task for a novice. Don’t worry; it’s not as hard as you think! With the help of some well-structured mind maps, you can plot the path to becoming an authority on any given topic, putting yourself in an excellent position to reap the rewards that brings. 

If you’re new to mind mapping, this amazing technique is an incredibly valuable way of structuring your thoughts. In my work as a podcaster, mind mapping helps me remember and take action on key points and ideas I want to get across to my audience, as well as to plan my strategy for promoting and monetizing my content. 

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Mind mapping, and especially online mind mapping powered by tools like MindMeister, is more than just a diagram of interconnected words and images. While the research-backed benefits of mind mapping, such as increased creativity and knowledge retention, help me keep distill and clarify my many ideas, collaborative functionality and smooth integrations add a new dimension to this process. 

It can for you, too. Let’s look at how you can maximize your thought leadership potential through the power of mind mapping.

Find out what mind mapping can do for you in this excellent explainer article

MAP #1: Get Guest Spots and Speaking Engagements

The more you can put yourself out there, the greater your influence as a thought leader will become. Getting yourself speaking engagements and guest spots on other podcasts is a great way to leverage your popularity and start on the path to thought leadership. The important thing to remember is that this is a process, not something that just happens. Start by connecting with like-minded people in your field and watch how it opens new doors and opportunities over time. 

With a little bit of luck and a lot of meaningful networking, you’ll soon be getting bookings for speaking gigs. It’s okay to start small and work toward larger venues as your online footprint increases. Each published podcast increases your online power as people search for experts in an industry, so make sure you’re keeping on top of your content schedule. 

When it comes to your networking efforts, mind mapping is your new best friend. Not only is it a great way to brainstorm and track the contacts you want to get in touch with, you can draw connections between the different branches of your map as you plot your route towards more interesting and lucrative engagements. 

In your map, identify your most popular topics and use MindMeister to link these to episodes from your podcast library. From here, you can work out who you need to get in touch with in order to feature in different places using something similar to the address book map we featured in the last post. Obviously the types of groups you’ll need to contact depends on your area of expertise, but there’ll be any number of clubs, businesses and institutions for whom you’d be a valuable in-person or virtual conference speaker. Envision a path to make these ideas a reality: if there are two opportunities in different subject fields that are closely related, use MindMeister’s connection feature to visualize this in your map.

Always try to promote your products, services or vision. This allows listeners to get a deeper understanding of who you are as a podcaster and the benefits you can provide as a potential speaker.

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MAP #2: Become a High-Value Guest

Now you’ve got some engagements booked, you’ll need to think of something interesting to say. While it’s tempting to simply develop a few soundbites and roll these out at every opportunity, this would be to forget the all-important triangle of purpose for podcast content: Guests x You x Listeners = Growth. 

When you are the guest, the “guest” part of the equation is more or less taken care of, which leaves a direct line between you and the listeners of whichever show or event you happen to be speaking to. Contrary to what you may think about the importance of how many people listen to a podcast, it’s actually the quality of the listener that matters most. 

Create a mind map with the show’s name and ask yourself some questions about the people you’re going to be speaking to. How engaged is the show’s fanbase? What about the show matters to them? What is the quality of that show’s content normally like? 

You should also check whether your host has been featured in any other magazines or blogs, and if so, see if these reviews give you any clues on potential topics. From your map, you can link any external content: helpful URLs, to reviews on iTunes, etc. if you like.

Find out more about linking and embedding content in the MindMeister Help Center.

MAP #3: Sell Books Through Podcasting

You’re a thought leader, so (naturally) you wrote a book. Now it’s time to shift some copies! Podcasts have become an increasingly popular and effective way to promote books. To get more people to read your magnum opus, you should consider two angles: effectively promoting your publication on your own podcast and using guest podcasters to do the same. Remember, simply writing a book is a big selling point in your favor — authors are valuable “experts” and sought-after podcast guests.   

You can use the two mind maps listed earlier in this article to locate the places you want to push your book and to develop tailored content specifically towards each audience you speak to. In this second map, go one step further and include extracts or quotes from your book that are particularly relevant to the target groups: actually speaking directly from your book to the listeners is a great way to drive engagement. 

Many authors new to podcast marketing make a similar mistake: booking all their podcasts during their book launch and then stopping. Listeners need to hear about your book multiple times to make a book purchase, so use your content scheduling map from my last article to ensure that you spread coverage efficiently.

MAP #4: Customer Acquisition Through Thought Leadership Podcasts

You’ve got a product. You’ve got a podcast. So how do you use one to sell the other? Well, businesses acquire customers through thought leadership podcasting in a number of different ways. As ever, audience identification is key to this strategy: if your podcast and product are not aligned, then it will be incredibly difficult to use your thought leadership to create buzz for your company. 

However, based on the assumption that your listener base contains at least some engaged listeners who could be converted into buyers, mind mapping with MindMeister can really help you nail down some solid thought leadership content and turn your podcast into a monetization machine. First, create a mind map that shows the needs and triggers of your potential customers. Use emotional, practical, technical, financial and other needs as guidelines for exploration. Be sure your podcast addresses these needs with specific content and action points.    

Then, create a separate mind map with the product you want to sell as the central topic: this will be central to any thought leadership podcasts you create. The first-level topics can be questions that help you ascertain whether it’s worth using the podcast for marketing purposes and, if so, which changes need to be made. Try the following:

  • What are your goals?
  • What’s your timeline?
  • How much will it cost?
  • How do you measure success?
  • Who’s going to help? 

As soon as you have some general ideas, you can formalize your plan into a more structured content marketing strategy, with clear tasks defining what needs to be done, by who, and when. Try the epic MindMeister-MeisterTask integration to help you do this.

MAP #5: Increase Customer Retention through Podcasting

Finding customers with podcasting is one thing: keeping them is another topic entirely. However, your thought leadership content could be a valuable tool in increasing loyalty and encouraging customers to stick with your brand. Although customer satisfaction is about more than just communication, using your podcast to spread the word about important updates and improvements to your product can help you build up important relationships with your customers. 

When it comes to creating content, it’s best to tackle your customers’ wishes and concerns head on. Copy the feedback you receive from customer surveys, online shop reviews or email correspondence into a mind map and build some topics around these points. You can use subtopics to add explanations to recurring issues, or notes if you need more space to say what you need, and use these as the talking points for your insightful podcast episodes.

Alternatively, you could go a step further and take a radical approach to customer feedback. Why not create a “public” mind map that your subscribers, fans and customers contribute to directly? This will foster a collaborative sense of community and may even open up new opportunities to share your podcast content that you didn’t see before.  

If you see specific users delivering consistently excellent feedback, you could even invite them to appear on your show. This builds in high quality testimonials you could reuse elsewhere, shows social proof to potential buyers and is a huge win for the customer being featured too.

Get some inspiration for your next public map from the incredible Public Maps Universe. Find out more!

Into the World! 

By creating compelling thought leadership content, you’ll boost your value as a podcaster to your current and potential listeners. Don’t be afraid to think out of the box, and of course, mind map with MindMeister to push your creativity and discover new avenues of communication.  

That concludes my three-part series on how mind mapping can help you turn your podcast from a distant dream into a tangible reality. I hope these blog posts have helped the budding podcasters among you and encouraged you to take the leap towards more excellent audio content. Remember, if you have questions reach out to me on Twitter and Instagram @espreedevora or email espree[at]hey.com 

And be sure to check out my podcasts! 

Women in Tech Podcast, womenintech.fm
WeAreLATech Podcast, wearelatech.fm 

I look forward to any comments you may have!

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