BINARY SEACH TREE ALGORITHM (in C++)

If you are given a paragraph and you are supposed to count the frequency of the words in that paragraph. Given that the the code to create the basic binary search tree is made, and it has templated key and templated values as parameters ( so it disregard data type). How would we like scan through that paragraph to get the words and then use our binary search tree? Or like how to even start? Any algorithm to count the words? BTW, I just want an algorithm... but if anyone can create a code for it is also cool! thank!