How To Use Infographics (A Client's Guide)

Our interactive guide to infographics. Click on any section to jump to that area of the guide

Our Technical Guide to Using Info-Graphics

Info-graphics are 'graphic visualisations of data, knowledge or information' that are designed to be shared socially, inform, engage the viewer as well as getting links to your site. 

Here's how to create successful info-graphics:

The most important part of creating any successful piece of content online is finding a topic people are interested in. You want your infographic to be related to the business or industry you are in, creative, engaging, socially shareable and informative. 

Infographics are like most marketing techniques and require creativity regardless of your niche. Here's a great blog post on 5 infographics for boring niches to get you inspired. 

When looking for a topic here's where to start:

• Google Reader- read this blog post about how to creating content with Google reader for more information 
• Topsy- it's an excellent source to find out what the influencers in your field are talking about
• Twitter
• Forums - depending on your subject and audience forums such as Money Saving Expert can be a goldmine 
• Quora 

Once you've found a subject that has an audience, there is no better way to test your idea than by reaching out to the audience you've identified. Get in touch with them and propose your idea for your infographic. 

This is another step that helps you to Reaching out directly to the people is excellent in many ways;

1. It tests how your ideal audience reacts to your idea (great way to prevent a failure) 
2. It engages your audience feel involved and thus more likely to share it once it's produced 
3. Can improve your idea with suggestions from your audience 
4. Your audience may actually be able to contribute to your infographic and will share it more actively

Here a guide to pitching your infographic to blogs that may help you in your early outreach. Or I've written a piece for Youmoz blog covering Reverse Audience Sourcing, check it out.  

Once you're happy that your idea has legs, have engaged your audience and are confident in it's success. Now's the time to get it made.

If you already know a talented designer then use them, if not services like Dribbble are great for finding talented artists to make your infographic.

Word of warning, always check to make sure your infographic is unique before paying the designer. You don't want to pay for a re hash of someone else's design.  

Getting your freshly created infographic out into the real world is the next and most important step. You want to get your infographic picked up by as many bloggers and media as possible, both online and offline as well as being shared socially on Facebook, Twitter, Google + etc. 

Here's a list of infographic submitting sites:

• http://www.infographicsarchive.com/submit-infographics/
• http://submitinfographics.com/
• http://infographicsite.com/submit-infographic/
• http://visual.ly
• Reddit.com/r/infographics/
• http://www.nerdgraph.com/submit-infographic/
• http://www.infographicfile.com/
• http://www.infographiclove.com (this is a paid submission)

If you've followed the steps above you'll already have engaged and seeded your infographic with bloggers and your audience. Begin by reaching out to these people first, then expand outreaching to as many blogs as you can, seeding your infographic with authorities such as Mashable, Techcrunch etc or the authoritive news sites/blogs in your field. 

If you've done everything right then people will start to share your infographic on their blog. By giving people an inbed code you are encouraging as many people as possible to link to you when they feature your infographic on their blog. 

Take advantage of your prior outreach work to make sure all the people you engaged with before creating it feature your infographic and link back to you. Then start additional outreach:

• Stalk People- In your research and prior outreach you should have identified an audience and their behaviours. You need to get your infographic featured on all the sites that your audience will like and could influence their behaviour. 
• Profile Similar Infographics- Despite the fact you've tried to make sure that your infographic is unique, different & fresh. there is no doubt that someone somewhere in the world has done something similar to your work. Find that piece of content or a popular infographic in your niche and use RevEye Reverse Image Search to find all the places this is featured. make sure all these people are aware of your infographic. 
• Get An Influencer to Feature It- Unfortunately it's not what you know, it's who you know. Use every resource/friend available to get your infographic out there. Every guest blog you feature on and twitter follower is another potential inbound link.  

Now you have completed most of the difficult part of creating a successful infographic, you may think now is the time to put your feet up and relax. However, once a your infographic has been featured and spread itself across the internet don't stop there. The beauty of an excellent infographics is they keep generating links.  

Using a RevEye Reverse Image Search you can identified all the places that have featured your infographic and reach out to them. 

If your infographic is still relevant, helpful and informative people will keep link to it and mentioning it online. Do monthly searches to find people who have used your image since it's launch but not used the inbed code, reach out to them asking as you published it under the creative commons license you'll like attribution, thus a link to the source. Most will be more than happy to do so. 

With each blog and mention online you are getting links. EPIC WIN!

Unsure of why you want links to your your site, then read this guide to Link building.