Online marketer and founder of HelloBar, Neil Patel has mentioned that infographics provided him the single best ROI he has had when it comes to getting backlinks and social shares.
The following are some resources and tips in making a good infographic:
1. Draw inspiration from infographic communities
Quite often the single greatest problem in creating infographics is finding a good topic to start on.
Go to sites like Visual.ly which has an infographic community to get ideas from and design layouts as well. Learn from the top rated ones and understand why the low quality ones are deemed low quality.
2. Make sure you have good data or complex data you can make simple
Another way to go about finding ideas for your infographics is to use tools like Buzzsumo.
Search for keywords relevant to your industry and Buzzsumo will rank the posts by number of social shares.
Go through the posts and see what kinds of data is available.
If it is interesting, it is worth a shot.
If it is complex yet interesting, analyse it and make it simple (these types of infographics tend to perform well).
When creating the infographic, try not to have more than 6 main pts (Neil’s recommendation) to avoid information overload.
Be sure to put an embed code generator at the bottom of the infographic on your page and have a header and footer (text based) when you publish it as well.
Here is an example.
Be sure to allow comments to maximize social reach as well.
3. How to make it viral
There are many people you can outreach this infographic to: media, industry blogs, etc.
But for the purposes of this post, I will talk about just 2 groups of people.
The first group is the source group.
While doing your research for the infographic, you are bound to gather information from certain sources and cite them at the bottom of your infographic.
With the complete infographic in hand, outreach to them stating that you have cited them in a recent infographic and ask them if they’d liked to share it.
The second group is the share group.
Remember when you checked Buzzsumo for the posts that are shared the most with keywords relevant to your industry?
Approach the ones who are authoritative using the “Influencer” tab and mention to them that you noticed that they had shared the previous content on so and so topic and that you have created an even better version of it and you would like to share it with them.
And of course, ask them if they can share it too.
In conclusion, when making a good infographic:
1. Draw inspiration from other infographics
2. Find interesting data and turn make them visual
3. Outreach the infographics to the key influencers in the space.
