How to Leverage Infographics to Generate Links and Social Signals

One of the most difficult aspects of SEO is attracting links for industries that are typically considered "dry" or "boring." How do you create content that is compelling, sexy, and generates the emotional response required for people to share on their site, or via social media? Hint, hint: think VISUAL.

Infographics are a fantastic way to generate visibility for industries that may struggle to attract links and social shares. People LOVE visual content, especially when it tells a story. A well-designed, attractive infographic can offer doors that 1,000 guest blog or outreach requests can’t. Combine social amplification with blogger and media outreach, and watch your social shares and links increase naturally.

 

This infographic, with more than 16,000 views on Visual.ly, generated hundreds of links for a health client.

Beyond the Literal

If you sell rugs, do NOT create an infographic about different types of rugs. Think laterally, not literally, and find interesting angles to explore that are relevant to your industry while being of interest to casual Web surfers.

For example, you could create an infographic about color theory, decor, and how these impact family dynamics. With this infographic you could reach out to home improvement sites announcing your infographic and requesting them to share it.

Here’s an infographic created for a site that offers home decor products.

When creating your infographic, don’t just share statistics. Tell a story with your infographics so that your visual content both attracts and informs. In the infographic above, we are teaching about the different baguas, how a home should be separated into distinct spaces, and other important feng shui principles. How much more engaging is this than an article explaining this with mere words? Think of the emotions that create a positive impact, and make sure your infographics contain those elements.

Create a Content Strategy Around Your Infographic

Most marketers who work with infographics simply share the infographic on their site with an embed code, and hope for it to get picked up. Many hope, and wait, in vain.

A more effective approach is to proactively reach out to other webmasters and offer for them to host the infographic on their sites. You reach out to them, announcing your infographic, and offering a unique article to go along with the infographic. In effect, you are guest posting, but with the additional incentive of a beautiful graphic to go along with the content. You can then suggest the site owner to list that page as one of the sources, and include the link in the article.

Article found on Kapost with the infographic hosted on their page.

The strength of this method lies in its ability to serve as a launching-point for additional content. The type of content that will be produced cannot be redundant, but act as supplements to the information that caused readers to be intrigued in the first place.

How to Leverage Blogger Outreach

Unless you have millions of people visiting your blog daily, you need to go out and find sites that would be interested in sharing your content and tell them about it. This is key to visibility.

For effective outreach, follow these steps:

1. Create a list of relevant sites to pitch by using Google search operators
2. Send a personalized pitch to the site, asking if they’d like to check out the infographic
3. If they’re interested in sharing it, write a custom introduction, including a link to one of your relevant landing pages
4. Follow up to make sure the site publishes the content
5. Promote the published articles through your social media channels

It’s important to approach sites that would be best-served in hosting the content. Sharing your infographic (with its intro) on a site that is not relevant would dissolve your topical authority, and would only serve to stir suspicions. Much like the creation of the infographic, thinking laterally will help when working on outreach.

Amplify the Content Placement

Once your infographic is shared, leverage the placement by promoting the published URL through your social media. But don’t just tweet it and forget it. Consider creating a Facebook ad campaign to promote that landing page, or possibly even amplify using a Pinterest or Twitter ad.

Site owners will be thrilled to see your content receiving social shares and engagement, thus paving the road for future contributions. You’ve worked hard to create a connection with that site owner, so don’t let it end there; offer to continue contributing articles or infographics as you develop them.

Google doesn’t want webmasters building links; they insist that links should be naturally earned on the basis of great content. The method described here is a way to be proactive about attracting links and social shares, without being directly responsible for those placements. It’s an effective way to improve your visibility without the risks of potential penalties.

Have you used infographics in the past to improve visibility? What methods have you found most effective when conducting outreach? Share your stories below!

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How to Create Awesome Infographics Without Being a Designer

If you’re anything like me, you learned how to use programs like Photoshop and Gimp out of necessity to do minor changes to photos. You might have even dabbled in some easier graphic design projects for your own website, but it takes you hours to get the image or the design looking just right and you’re left exhausted. You might even spend time looking up tutorials on how to achieve a certain effect and still have trouble re-creating it.

In short, while you do know your way around the programs like Photoshop to a certain extent, it takes you forever and there’s absolutely no way you’d call yourself a graphic designer. But then, you’re surfing around the web and you noticed some really cool infographics on things like fashion, music and food and you can’t help but wish that you could create something like that; even if it’d take you a week.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s definitely possible to create some awesome infographics in any category that you choose, EVEN if you’re not a designer. In this blog post, I’m going to introduce you to three awesome tools to create the best infographics, tell you how to use them AND how you can share your infographics in different channels all over the web. So, let’s get started!

Introducing Easel.ly

First of all, I love the name of this tool, it’s a great play on words using easel (as in drawing pad) to play on easily’.

Launched two years ago in 2012, Easel.ly has hundreds of awesome infographic templates and design objects that even the most design novice can customize and share online. You can drag and drop design elements however you see fit or even upload your own background image from scratch as a template. The best part? Easel.ly is free!

Easel.ly is super popular with students, teachers and business owners who need to put together lesson plans or concepts in easy-to-follow visual forms. In fact, Easel.ly received the 2013 Best Websites for Teaching and Learning Award from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL).

So how does it work? Simply go to Easel.ly and click on ‘Create an Infographic’. Once you land on the page, you can pick a blank template or one of the other several hundred and get started!

Choose a category to find the best template that you want and then work your magic, dragging and dropping different backgrounds, themes, shapes, objects and putting in text. Then you can save it and share it through a browser link, a web link you can embed into your blog and share it via Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest!

In terms of going the extra mile in sharing your awesome infographic via social, you could even try attracting new audiences on LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram and even using new tools like Glossi to create a new platform like an online magazine featuring cool infographics before sharing them. Creativity and a little out-of-the-box thinking can go a long way.

How to Describe Piktochart

Piktochart is another awesome online tool for creating cool infographics. It’s little more in-depth then Easel.ly in that it’s a software platform that allows you to embed videos, change the fonts, colours, add different line elements and even charts.

You can even import Google or Excel spreadsheets to create your own charts and customize the infographic by uploading your own images or using the more than 2000 high-res, print-ready graphics in the Piktochart library. Note: While you can change the colors of the icons and graphics from the Piktochart library, you can’t use the program to change the colors on your own images. You’d have to make the changes on an external program first

When it comes to sharing your Piktochart infographic, you can choose the size and the orientation, down to the paper size that you want to print it on. You can embed it in an email campaign and send it through your email campaign client such as MailChimp, MyEmma or Constant Contact and share it via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ just by uploading it to your status update.

You can even include it in online Flickr galleries and share it in your Google+ communities, LinkedIn groups and Google Hangouts to help MAKE ONLINE collaborations a little more creative and visually informative.

How ReciteThis is Different

OK, so up until this point, I’ve been sharing a couple of really cool infographic tools with you that help you make IMAGE-based infographics. So they’re all a little more visual. But, what if you want to create a cool infographic using quotes or proverbs?

That’s where ReciteThis comes in. You can turn a quote into a masterpiece simply by typing whatever quote or proverb into the text box, or choosing a quote from the ReciteThis database. Then you select a background from a slideshow at the bottom of the page and press ‘Create’.

Afterwards, you have the option of posting it to Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or StumbleUpon to share with friends, downloading it for printing purposes or to share with other platforms like LinkedIn or e-mailing it to anyone you want.

So now you know how to create some amazingly fun, creative and detailed infographics-even if you’re NOT a graphic designer! Keep it locked here for more great tips on content MARKETING new social marketing and online tools AND tricks on how to better reach your audiences.

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The Impact of Social Media on the PR Industry [Infographic]

A few years back, a new era began, an era where ordinary people have a ‘say’ on every possible matter, anytime, anywhere – the emergence of social media has altered our lives enormously by giving everyone the opportunity to be a publisher and a communicator. This, in turn, has had a huge impact on the Public Relations practice, which has always been concerned with communicating and building relationships with various publics. The infographic presents in what way social media has impacted the PR practice, based on the research findings of my BA dissertation.

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5 Key Benefits of In-House Digital Advertising [INFOGRAPHIC]

When it comes to digital advertising on social media, we know it pays to keep it in the family.

Digital leaders realize they no longer need to funnel online advertising budgets through multiple third parties (which each take their own cut of the action). "If you bring that team in-house, you have an opportunity to share cross-channel findings, be agile, to do more with programmatic," says Kathy O'Dowd, senior manager for programmatic buying in North America at Netflix. "That’s an amazing opportunity to take advantage of."

The rise of sophisticated publisher-direct ad automation platforms has allowed companies to reign in their digital advertising efforts under one roof and reap the benefits that come with in-house control of social media ad campaigns.

Bringing digital advertising in-house to truly own user acquisition and remarketing from start to finish is a growing trend. We've boiled down five of the top benefits of this approach, from welcome cost savings to speed and performance gains that can significantly boost the bottom line.

Take a look at the infographic below for an at-a-glance perspective on in-house digital advertising: the foundation of performance marketing success on social media.

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Finding Your Audience on Facebook [INFOGRAPHIC]

Getting a good overview of the capabilities for reaching the right audience on Facebook can be a bit tricky. The alternatives seem endless, which is a good thing, but also adds to the confusion regarding what the best options are. Having recieved hundreds of questions on this topic from advertisers using Qwaya, we decided to put together an exhaustive overview of all the options advertisers currently have when building a target audience on Facebook.

The output is this infographic, and I hope it will serve you well!

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Where Is the Ad Spend Headed? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Marketo recently put together a great content marketing infographic that pits traditional advertising against content marketing in terms of spend and effort.  This makes a lot of sense: advertising is content we’re putting out into the world, after all, but the channels are generally analog.  

The biggest difference between content marketing and advertising, though, is that one of the main principles of content marketing is getting out there and marketing the marketing, which isn’t something one would typically do with a traditional print ad or a digital banner ad (which I’ll call Direct Marketing, therefore differentiating it from “advertising” – something that’s meant to generate a click or an action is a direct marketing tactic).  That being said, as content marketing matures as a discipline, it’s inevitable that some of its radical core principles will influence its more conservative cousin, Traditional Advertising.

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are neck-and-neck on where folks are distributing their content; this surprised me until I remembered that, as a new discipline, a lot of content marketers I know (and this includes me) are B2B marketers, and LinkedIn is the channel for that.  

Also surprising to me was finding that more than half the content marketers surveyed outsource their content, but perhaps it shouldn’t: I know more than anyone the challenges of continually producing relevant, engaging content.  With average budgets growing, I’m sure we’ll continue to see content marketing apps and other software products crop up as folks scramble to programmatically address the new content marketing landscape.

Content Marketing Infographic

While we can’t be sure where content marketing is headed, and what that means for PR and Social Media as content marketing disciplines by default, the trend is that more companies are spending more money on this new department.  The good news: content marketing metrics are easier to establish and track than traditional media spend, so the elusive ROI debate should be easier to manage with skeptical senior executives.

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What Happens in Just ONE Minute on YouTube [INFOGRAPHIC]

YouTube is the third most trafficked website behind Google and Facebook, with at least 2,777,777 videos being viewed in just a minute.

What else happens in 60 seconds? YouTube makes an estimated $10,654.49; at least 1,388 channel subscriptions are formed; and 100 hours of videos are uploaded.

This just shows how obsessed with video content we are.

Take a look at this infographic created by YouTubeDownloader illustrating what happens in a YouTube minute.

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Everything You Need to Know About Facebook Page Apps [INFOGRAPHIC]

Social Media Marketers are always looking to "cut through the clutter" (really overused, I know) in an effort to get their Facebook marketing campaigns noticed. As community managers and social media marketers try to make their promotions, campaigns and contests come across as more professional, more personalized and more branded - they're turning to third-party Facebook Page apps to help them acheive this.

Simply put, a Facebook App is a mini-website that sits on your Facebook page and allows you to give your fans an experience that goes beyond the realm of Facebook - but is still tied back to Facebook's Open Graph allowing the contest or promotion in the app to stay connected to social media and go viral.

Yet, there are a fair amount of community managers and social media marketers who don't quite "get" Facebook Apps or completely understand the concept. Circus Social put together an infographic titled, "Everything You Need to Know About Facebook Apps" that neatly portrays what a Facebook App is, what it helps marketers achieve and how they can put them to good use. It also debunks a fair amount of myths and questions about Facebook Apps that are often asked.

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Why The Decline in Facebook Reach is Good For Brands

There has been a lot written about the decline in organic reach on Facebook. The data has been poured over, conspiracy theories have been written, and the overall conclusion has been that Facebook is stealing hard earned reach from page owners, leading many to look for a new area of focus away from Facebook. However, we believe the decline in organic reach on Facebook offers an opportunity for brands, and here’s why.

Before organic reach began its steep decline, all Facebook pages were in a slightly strange position. They had organic reach, generally of around 20-35% of their audience, and were involved in a battle to optimise this to make minor improvements. There was a lot of hoping involved, particularly when it came to the reach of pieces of content that had been expensive to create.

Facebook has naturally seen a decline in organic reach due to the fact that there are more pages than ever before, users on average like more pages, and those pages are creating more content than ever. This leads to a highly competitive space, with pages competing for attention in the News Feed space of their users alongside content from friends, families, groups and events.

In the balance of fairness, it’s also important to mention that not all pages are seeing a big decline in organic reach. In fact some are actually growing. We have a number of clients where organic reach is improving month on month and year on year. There are no tricks involved in this, this just comes from an understanding of the audience, a data led content strategy, and a programme of consistent content optimisation. By applying data to your Facebook content you can see strong improvements, as discussed in our social content eBook recently here.

But for those where organic reach is decreasing, this isn’t necessarily the end of the world. In today’s Facebook, brands and professional marketers have an advantage that they never had before.  Brands are able to promote their content to new audiences, ensure that their best content receives more reach, and specify which audiences see their content based on real life data. The decrease in organic reach has led Facebook to advance their ad product at a fast rate, enabling new targeting options and new ad formats that are highly effective for advertisers.

Previously, brands were competing with all sorts of poorly run pages, some of which were solely concentrated on gaming the Facebook algorithm to get as much reach as possible. Now, brands are in control of their own destiny. Whilst it’s worth optimising and using data to improve your organic reach amongst your fanbase, the key to success now really lies in effective promotion of content through the ads platform.

A large amount of page owners are not serious enough about Facebook marketing to spend budget, and many of the rest are unsure as to how to best promote their content. For brands, this gives a great opportunity to achieve high levels of reach at relatively cost effective levels. With competition still not particularly high, brands can really dominate and achieve fantastic results at low levels of spend.

If you haven’t got involved yet, now is the time. Set a goal for your content, understand your audience, and promote your best posts effectively by using the full range of targeting options in order to succeed.

Don’t see the decline in organic reach as the end of your Facebook marketing. Take the opportunity to grow your reach in a controlled way, amongst the people who you want to see your content.

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Facebook Fraud: Click Farms and How to Avoid Them [INFOGRAPHIC]

Companies are often drawn to advertising on Facebook to increase visibility of their brand. That visibility can reflect poorly on a company if it's tied to click farms that employ low-paid workers to "like" company pages. Through the following example, learn more about what click farms are, why they are harmful, and how we can better avoid them.

A key takeaway is: Know your audience and choose quality over quantity with your paid Facebook ads' demographic reach. By choosing the right demographic and staying away from click farms, you reduce your ads' visibility in risky regions and get a more engagement metric on Facebook.

Avoid these common farming locations. Mexico, Brazil, Portugal, Egypt, Nepal, Bangladesh, Philippines and Indonesia.

Take a look at this infographic from Verticalmeasures to learn more about how to avoid Facebook Fraud: Click Farms.

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How to Improve Your Engagement on Google Plus [INFOGRAPHIC]

The most shared post in my SMToolbox column this year was the interview with Martin Shervington on Google Plus. Martin has now produced a really useful overview of how to improve your engagement on Google Plus.

Some of the key lessons set out by Martin in the infogrraphic below include:

• build a circle of your top 100 brand evangelists and supporters: if you do nothing else take this advice
• avoid spamming people by choosing 'notify by email'
• use the Explore tab to see what others are sharing and get involved in conversations
• use Hangouts, personally I cant emphasise this enough. You can start to build strong personal relationships with Hangouts
• join communities but don't just share your own content and focus on one or two where you can commit the time to be involved
• an engaging Goolge Plus post has images, mentions people, is formatted well and stands on its own as a post, see Martin's tips below.

If you want to take your Google Plus activity further do check out Martin’s PlusYourBusiness Quick Starter kit. There are helpful videos and guides to improve your performance on Google+. 

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Apple’s Perfection vs. Google’s Crowdsourcing [INFOGRAPHIC]

Did you know that the top four most valuable brands in the world are all tech companies? And leading them all is the gutsier and more aggressive Google, which has overtaken Apple for the No. 1 spot, by a margin of almost $11 billion.

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Google vs. Facebook: Who Is Winning the Tech Cold War? [INFOGRAPHIC]

 

Facebook and Google are at war spending billions on technology specialists and applications. And it seems like these tech companies are battling for control of the internet. The new cold war isn't about army, tanks or missiles — it's about winning the digital world and commanding consumer attention.

 

So who is winning the tech cold war?

 

Take a peek at this infographic from whoishostingthis team that presents the timeline comparison between Google and Facebook acquisitions.

So what's the next in the proxy war between these two titans? Will one side emerged as the dominate power, or will they be locked in a stalemate for years to come? And what does this means for the consumer? Who do you think will come out on top?

10 Facebook Rules Every Business Needs to Know Before Posting [INFOGRAPHIC]

On Facebook there isn’t one “perfect post” or ideal time of day to post. Instead, you can develop a strategy that gets different types of content to different types of people, at different times. The key factor to remember when creating Facebook content is that you need to be vigilant—constantly looking to diversify what and when you post.

1. Keep things positive

Being positive promotes engagement and encourages sharing. Equally as important, being negative may cost you fans. People are quick to unlike a business if posts are negative or controversial.

2. Make your posts informative by giving “tips” and including links

The most appealing updates are ones that offer something. Don’t disclose everything — this increases the likelihood that fans will click.  Post an interesting fact. If you are an expert in the field, share tips. If you’re sharing a blog post or an online article, create a status update that features the piece’s most interesting fact or statement to stir reader curiosity and encourage click-throughs. Instead of copying and pasting a long URL into your status update, use a link-shortener like Bit.ly to make your post brief and more likely to be shared.

3. Always Include images and your logo

Posts with images get the highest amount of engagement on Facebook, so be sure to include one when you can. The perfect size is 800×600. Increase your brand awareness by including your logo on the images that you post. Creating content is “king.” The more original content you can create, the better.

4. Keep your posts mobile-friendly

Use simple imagery that can easily be seen on mobile devices — anywhere from 50-70% of your fans read your posts on their phones.  This means that when you are creating content, mobile users should be your first thought as opposed to being an afterthought.

5. Thank and reward your fans

Your fans want to feel as if they are part of a community. This turns casual fans into brand advocates. Make your fans feel as if they are benefiting from being your fan. Offer Facebook exclusive deals and thank them. This helps your business grow through word of mouth and proves popular as a post topic.

6. Always respond to posts

Posts aren’t the only activities that grab attention — comments and responses are equally as important. Engage with people and build relationships through conversation.  This includes being available to respond and addressing negative feedback. Never delete a negative post. Instead, address it and own it. Admitting fault makes you look more credible. 

7. All of your posts need to be engaging

Ask questions to get engagement. Multiple choice questions, fill in the blank, and describe this picture in three words are all simple techniques that increase engagement. You cannot simply share stories or information. Engage the audience with your posts. The more people are engaged with your content, the more people that will see your content. If you are posting consistently with your company logo (see #3), the more people will develop a connection between your company and your message.

 8. You should be posting 5-10 times a week

A common mistake many companies make is posting too much or too little. You want to make sure that fans see your brand. Your “superfans” will see all of what you post, whereas casual fans will see less. Posting 5-10 times a week helps assure that if fans missed a message on Monday, they will see a different message on Tuesday.

9. Get feedback from your fans

All too many companies fail to get feedback from their fans.  Your Facebook fans can be your own personal focus group and they are often interested in sharing their opinions. Additionally, they like to think that their opinion could help shape future business decisions.

10. Develop a consistent tone

It is important that you aren’t harming your brand by posting information that does not match your brand identity. Just because you find something amusing, doesn’t mean that your fans will.

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