How to Create and Use Infographics to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

This is a guest contribution from Luke Guy.

Let me start this post by telling you a quick story: I once created this niche site that I thought would do really well. I wanted to flex my SEO skills, and see if I could a new site ranked rather quickly (I talk about how I perform outreach with sites like this at Lukeguy.com).

The new site would solve a problem like no other in its field – I had created this site for insect identification purposes, and it would help people with identifying bugs within hours. You would upload an image and there you got your bug identified rather quickly. So now you could find out if that bug was potentially harmful within a short amount of time.

I thought this helpful tool would promote itself, and would climb quickly. But was I wrong! I thought by me building it, people would come. I was wrong again. Wasn’t long before I realized my cool little tool needed promotion just like anything else. That’s when the journey began.

I turned to the greatest promotional tool on the planet, the blog, to launch my tool that I had created. I have been collecting steady links ever since, and was even  featured on Lifehacker within just a few months.

How did I do this? It all started with one thing: the infographic.

As bloggers, our goal is to increase readers and traffic. The best way to increase traffic is to put out great content, and the number two way is by increasing the promotion of that great content.

You can have the greatest content in the world, but without amazing outreach, it’s not going to be discovered. With my niche site, however, I understood that fairly early on and now find my blog climbing the ranks with Google as well. All because of this one infographic creation plan I’m about to tell you about.

Infographics and Traffic

How does an infographic drive traffic when all the info is included in the picture? Good question!

As you know, SEO traffic is the largest source of traffic that major sites get. By getting links from large sites, this will help your Domain Authority and increase your position in the search engines. The reason an infographic is great at getting this is because you can create one and have it posted on hundreds of sites. You create one graphic and get it posted everywhere without anything bad happening! You can’t do that with guest posting, and copy the same content everywhere, without Google penalties. This is a great reason to do infographic in my eyes and many others.

My infographic was about bugs that bite people and what they looked like. That was it. However it was important to know and people were looking for something like this, and they wasn’t getting it. The infographic is landing major sites and collecting many links from sites all over. By this happening, my past post is now increasing in ranking with Google also and are being seen by more people also. Which is pretty sweet when you think it about it. The infographic has been seen by over 19,000 people and many more to come.

The infographic is amazing stuff, but remember you may not be able to do this all the time, simply because infographics take a lot of energy and time. But they will definitely pay off if you do it with strategy. I don’t recommend one every week, or even every month. Just have a good one and promote it for months. Blogs are so much easier to write and they’re not as costly. However, the infographic gives you that extra nudge which every young blog needs in the beginning. They help the most with backlinks which is very important with SEO according to Cyrus Shepard from Moz.

Before you build your infographic

Let’s talk about how to create your infographic. First of all, study what you want your infographic to be about. The best infographics solve a problem by focusing on a solution. It makes someone’s life easier in less time. It’s entertaining and as well as being helpful, so by you creating an infographic that solves a problem you’re more likely to receive a timely response with traffic. Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

So think of a major problem you can solve for your readers, and brainstorm how you can make it an infographic. Make it enjoyable to look at, and as eye-catching as possible.

Factors your infographic should include for best results:

• a solution to a problem
• great design
• educational and entertaining
• statistics
• sources

How to ensure your choice of infographic topic is a successful one

A suggestion I have is to build an infographic around content that’s already successful on the web. I’m not saying plagiarise, but build upon or put your own spin on the topic. That successful content may offer a solution to a problem your readers are needing to solve, but you see some holes you can fill, room for improvement. You want to turn this up notch with more data, more images, creating your very own masterpiece. With their shares, likes and comments as an indicator that people liked what they saw, you can be assured that it will do well when turned into an infographic. So by confirming validation from another source, you can be assured through the process that this graphic has potential.

This is the method movie producers take. They watch a book and see how people react to it. If it becomes a bestseller, that book usually (almost always) turns into a film. They’re about to invest millions, and they’re not about to do it on an unread book.

Outsourcing your infographic

If you don’t have graphic design experience or software, you may wish to hire someone to complete your infographic, which can cost anywhere from $100 to $600 and even beyond, depending on the content and how much time you have. However if you invest money in your infographic, it can be a driving factor when pushing this into the atmosphere. It can make you push harder when you realize you’ve invested actual cash in making your infographic successful.

Creating your infographic

If you have opted to create the infographic yourself, you might find you struggle with where to find great fonts and images. I myself use daFont and they have over 28,000 fonts there (for free) to choose from. Once you find a font you like, simply download it, and install into your font file on your computer. Here are some articles that show you how to install fonts step-by-step:

1. How do I install fonts on my Windows PC?
2. How to install a font under Windows?
3. How do I install fonts on my Mac?
4. How To Install Fonts on a Mac

There are also plenty of image creation tools like Canva or Piktochart which allows you to use the icons already available. These sites have templates you can just populate with your ideas, rather than starting from scratch.

Researching your infographic

By you reading other articles, and by getting a feel of how other people view your topic, you will have an idea of the conversations around it. Reading all the articles on the subject gives you an idea of what’s missing out there. I’d consider plugging your keywords into Buzzsumo and see how many popular on social media your subject is.

Finishing your Infographic

Once you’re done, how do you know your work is complete – it’s not like you can go and change a line here and there like you can on a blog post?

To be honest, I don’t think anyone ever feels like their graphic is “complete”, but there is a point where you must release and watch what happens. You’ll know when that time has arrived. The most important thing is that you have gone the extra mile in bringing reliable data together. If that data is incorrect, everything else falls apart.  Header design won’t help you, great fonts won’t help you, cool illustrations won’t help you. Make sure to stress data accuracy.

To see what successful infographics look like, I have compiled a list for you of featured infographics by major blogs (such as Hubspot). They either featured these from other blogs or made it themselves.

Inspiration: Successful Infographics

You might like to have a look at this list I’ve put together of infographics that have done really well to help you get an idea of what works and maybe what you can include in your offering.

1. Nutrition 101 Recap: Top 5 Tips to Eat More Nutritiously
2. THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO NOTE TAKING IN CLASS
3. The Ultimate Guide to Creating Visually Appealing Content
4. Imaginary Factory
5. Games controllers
6. What happens in an internet minute?

Promoting Your Infographic

As for the promoting of the infographic, you really need to write an amazing blog post to go with it. It will help give your infographic context, and provide background and more information. If readers and other influencers link to your blog post when they share, all these words that you have in that blog post could trigger some search engine traffic, which increases your exposure. By you adding the infographic to your blog post, the chances of someone linking to you has now increased tremendously. People can’t copy/paste your content onto their blog and be successful with SEO, however they can use your infographic and do quite well. That means more shares and backlinks for you, and that’s a good thing.

From there, start looking for major blogs in the same niche as your infographic, and reach out to them. Email them and see if they would be willing to possibly publish your infographic once you have it up, and explain what is in it for them. It might not be the path that everyone would choose, but what I would do is aim at sending it to 100 or 200 journalists. Figure out who they are, what their contact details are, and see if they would be interested in sharing this infographic with a tailored email pitch. If only five major blogs out of 200 use your infographic, it could mean 50,000 views and many other quality backlinks to your site 

Once the ball gets rolling your infographic could land in search engines and give you steady traffic every month. – thus completing the mission for your blog.

If you’re looking for an email template in how you should present this, I’ve compiled a list of articles that explain that very well. Even though there’s only four here, they are slammed with content that can help you land your infographic on “mega-sites”.

Email Outreach Templates:

1. The Link Builder’s Guide to Email Outreach (template at bottom)
2. How to Get Influencers to Promote Your Content for Free (template midways)
3. Outreach Letters for Link Building (template at beginning)
4. How to Email Busy People (template midways)

Where to find influencers to share your infographic

This maybe the hardest part of the process for you, I know it was for me.

The best thing I can advise is know your niche. Understand what is the focus of your niche and who is the top influencer in that category. Once you have this down, you must scout possible sites that you can reach out to. If you’ve never seen an infographic on a site, good chance they won’t publish yours. I’d also look to see if they’ve published infographics from other sites, if they have, that’s a very good sign.

With larger sites, they seem to cover every subject, and they have many authors on those sites. If you watch the subject and the tone of the journalist and you see a match with them within your niche, I’d consider reaching out. There’s a good chance they write for other major blogs also.

To find these rather quickly, I’d suggest using the Google method.

Simply replace “keyword” with the word that matches your niche best and put “infographic” in quotations like this: keyword “infographic”.

Your search could look like more like:

• marketing “infographic”
• seo “infographic”
• logo design “infographic”
• pest control “infographic”
• marriage counseling “infographic”
• dating tips “infographic”

Conclusion

Understand outreach isn’t easy and can even be depressing at times, but by keeping a steady pace, you could really get some traction, resulting in traffic to your site. You will get tired, and things maybe tough during this process. You may have to take a break and come back. However, if you make outreach a daily habit, there’s no reason why you can’t completely crush your niche. It all takes time.

My ranking is doing well by the way and I’m on the verge of cracking a major keyword. That keyword come to a monthly of around 10,000 people. I’m three positions away from hitting frontpage and to think the site is only just a few months old. I’m ecstatic!

I hope this post helps you, and that this post helps fulfill your blogging dream.

Luke Guy is THE SEO guy who isn’t your average robot who talks just about backlinks. He focuses on connections and uses this ability to rank well among search engines while using his strategies. Get his free eBook “How To Guest Post On Any Blog While Crushing SEO” to learn more.