You see them all the time, but infographics are far from being overdone. According to CrowdRiff, the infographic is still an easy way to garner attention: there’s an 80 percent increase in users’ willingness to read content when it is paired with colored visuals. When the proper work goes into them, infographics can still be great for contextual link building.
As long as they are accurate, interesting, informative, and eye-catching, they can be a great way to show thought leadership. It also helps you create more variety in your content, all while attracting links from others sharing your infographic on their own websites and social media profiles. Below are some of the strategies you can use to use infographics to build more links.
Appeal to The Top Dog
If you have a large brand or entity in your industry, why not do an infographic about it? All brands like coverage, and it’s hard to resist and visually-appealing graphic that gives interesting facts about a company most people know. This can, in turn, help promote you and your services. Let’s say you were a website design firm that specialized in building WordPress websites. WordPress is the most commonly used content management system (CMS) on the internet today.
By creating an infographic about WordPress and publishing it on your own website and social media, you’re not only promoting the area in which you specialize, but you’re also increasing your chances of it being shared by other WordPress enthusiasts. Consider tagging industry publications that cover your infographic’s topic on Twitter or use industry chat and informative hashtags to make sure it’s seen by the people who are most likely to be interested in it. For the WordPress example, the agency could tag the WordPress publication WPBeginner to hopefully get coverage on their publication. As an example, here’s is an infographic WPBeginner created on their own that shares 25 interesting facts about WordPress.
Be careful not to spam publications. Simply saying something like, “Hey @WPBeginner, we are so proud of this beautiful infographic on #WordPress in 2018 if you’re interested in sharing! URL.” Don’t do the same tweet 5 times tagging a different publication or company each time– do it all at once. That’s what of the benefits of Twitter’s new 280 character limit!
Use Original Art and Data
Another way to appeal to the top dogs in your industry is to creatively display what they have to say. When possible, use an outside or in-house graphic designer to create original art that goes along with your facts. If your info is mainly in the form of experts quotes, you can create caricatures of the experts, like the Pixel Road team did for this infographic on Search Engine Journal:
The experts likely loved seeing cartoon versions of themselves and probably shared the content more since it was a fun twist on what they had to say.
If your infographic is more about sharing facts and figures, try to use original data when it makes sense. This will increase your chances of being linked to since the data can’t be found anywhere else, so potential sharers likely haven’t seen it before. Try to create original data that has new findings or angles that other reports haven’t talked about before. Sharing new data can further prove your thought leadership with giving users a great reason to promote your infographic.
Reach Out to Sources
If you are doing an infographic with data pulled from outside sources– that’s totally okay! Just make sure that: 1) it isn’t just pulling from other infographics, which could be seen as lazy (unless you swear you can do it better) and 2) you use the benefits of using outside information to your advantage.
This means that if you are using someone else’s information, it is to your benefit to make sure they know about it. Once you credit them in the infographic (usually at the bottom in the footer), send an email out to a main email or a contact at the company you are sourcing (this is best if possible– use LinkedIn or an email finder tool like Hunter to get an exact person).
Let them know that you used their great information from which specific link or resource, then provide the link to your infographic. You can even make it easy for them to share by sending them a few prepared tweets (using something like Click to Tweet) that they could instantly send to their social media team to schedule, as well as the embed code that they could use to easily create a blog post of their own to share the infographic. We have also offered to write exclusive intro copy for our sources to post with our infographic if that makes their job easier. By making it as easy as possible to share, you are removing their excuses not to, especially since it sources their own data.
Share With Applicable Outlets
Promoting your infographic with industry publications is a similar tactic to blog outreach where you ask blogs to link to your content. Instead of linking to your blog posts, you are asking them to link to your infographics. In many cases, you’ll find that posting an infographic and including a source link may be a lot harder for your contacts to say no to. If gives them a relatively easy new piece of content, and it only takes a few minutes to write up a 150-300 word summary based on the infographic’s findings.
To figure out which publications may take the bait, research industry blogs and websites to see if they have linked or shared infographics in the past. Use the search option on their website or search on Twitter for their username + #infographic or infographic to see if they’ve tweeted anything recently. If you find a blog post or tweet, this might be a good segway in the introduction of your email to connect why you are reaching out today. For example, you could say, “I noticed you shared an infographic about bacon last month, and I thought you’d love our new infographic about cheese that we worked hard on and just published yesterday.” Make a personal connection with their content or what they’ve shared to show you follow and respect them, and make sure you cater your pitch differently to each outlet (don’t just copy and paste).
Republish Elsewhere
Besides trying to get other outlets and experts to share your infographic, you can also make sure you share it on all platforms that you can. There are a few visual social media platforms that make it easy to share infographics with the followers you have there.
For instance, many publications, bloggers, and e-commerce websites have seen huge gains in referral traffic from Pinterest, which has over 200 million monthly active users, an increase from 150 million just a year ago according to TechCrunch. Tall (vertically orientated) graphics have been shown to do better on Pinterest than other sizes, so infographics are a natural fit.
You can also share your infographic on SlideShare, which actually takes all media, not just presentations. You can even search for infographics specifically in the “file type” filter:
Even if your website already published the infographic, sharing it on Slideshare could be a good way to get more views. LinkedIn Publisher and Medium might also be good places to republish it as well, as long as you link back to the original source.
Finally, Visual.ly is a niche community that shares infographics and other media in a similar format to Pinterest. It bills itself as “the largest online collection of infographics.” It is currently one of the top search results for “find infographics” so if someone is looking for an infographic to share on a specific topic, they may come to Visua.ly to find it.
Whether you are sharing on social media, reaching out to cited experts or industry publications, or hoping your original data gets you noticed, infographics are a great way to appeal to your industry. They break up your content, create visually enticing images that get users’ attention, and have a much easier barrier to entry to get others to share. Consider creating more useful and engaging infographics in your content strategy to get more shares, traffic, and credibility in your industry.
