If you haven’t heard about infographics yet, you have quite a lot of catching up to do. Infographics are graphic representations of information. They can be short and simple or long and detailed, but no matter which way you slice it, an infographic is a must-have tool in your online marketing arsenal.
Over the past year, infographics grew from a rare-but-amazing-time-suck to an influx of hundreds of new designs each day. As people have heard about the traffic and links that can be gained from infographics, they’ve jumped on the bandwagon and lucky for you, 90% of them are doing it wrong! Also lucky for you, this post will be the first in a weekly series about how to do it right.
Let’s begin with traffic. Building links with infographics are a priority, but in the end they are a priority because links help SEO and SEO helps traffic. There are many ways that infographics can help boost traffic to your website for a short stint, but here are 5 ways you can use this visual medium to grow your traffic for the long haul:
1. Grow Your Brand
If you are online, then it’s likely you rely on your web presence to help impact your monthly revenues. While not all webmasters care about building a brand, those that do often have an uphill battle trying to get some brand recognition on the vast world wide web.
Luckily, there are many ways to build your brand online. Infographics can be especially useful for this purpose. Use infographics to evangelize your products and brand by creating visually stimulating designs that can catch the attention of your audience quickly. For instance, instead of an “about us” page, consider creating an infographic that explains your business. If you have a new product that you think will take off, if only people knew about it, create an infographic to show what makes it so amazing. If the infographic is catchy enough, other webmasters will post it, which will help spread the word about your brand and gain more traffic to your website.
2. Build Links With Your Embed Code
One of the most missed opportunities when launching an infographic is that of the illusive embed code. An embed code is simply a few lines of HTML placed under or above the infographic, that any webmaster can copy and paste into their own site to repost the design.
The embed code should include (at minimum) the exact URL of your infographic with a link wrapped around it that will send people back to your website to view the full size version of your infographic.
More often than not, infographics are posted without this embed code, thus making it harder for someone to repost them, or the embed code contains relative URLs, meaning it will not work on any other website.
As mentioned before, infographics are link building tools, and to launch an infographic without including proper embed code is like throwing half of your potential links into the trash. Providing proper embed code, on the other hand, helps to insure that other webmasters can easily repost your infographic, which will drive immediate and future traffic to your website and build links to improve your SEO.
3. Click to Enlarge: The Bounce Rate Killer
Let’s face it, there are very few websites these days that don’t have a right or left sidebar. That means that there are few websites that have a content area 1000 pixels wide. So why are so many infographics designed at that width? Besides everything just looking better larger, wider infographics require an extra click to view at full scale.
OK, so this is likely not the reason designers choose to create infographics at 1000 pixels wide, but it is why we require all of our designers to keep that dimension unless otherwise specified by a client, and even then we discuss the opportunity of the “click to enlarge” action before reducing size.
Think about it: most blogs have content areas that are 500 to 600 pixels in width. Good infographics contain a large amount of detailed data, which means they could wind up very long when restricted to 600 pixels in width. The solution to this problem has been for webmasters to post the infographic at a scaled down resolution of 500 pixels wide, and viewers just know (of course captions and links help) to click the image to view it at full scale. This extra click may not seem like much, but it will increase your page views and decrease your bounce rate, thus helping your SEO and traffic numbers.
To ensure this is done right, don’t let people click through to just the infographic image URL at full size, instead have them click through to a coded page on your website that is built for a 1000 pixel width infographic.
4. Reach Out to Bloggers
Unfortunately, the majority of infographics do not enjoy the magical success of the Field of Dreams. More often than not, if you build it, they won’t come… unless you tell them about it that is. Unless your website gets thousands of viewers every day, you will need to let people know that your infographic exists to ensure more people see it. The best way to do this is to reach out to bloggers that you think will find the infographic interesting.
Ask those bloggers to repost the infographic while pointing out how you think it will be valuable to their readers. Make sure your repost requests are unique and not canned emails as any one of us can sniff out a canned email these days.
5. Post to Social Networks
If you want to reach your audience with an infographic, one of the best ways to do so is by posting it to Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon. All 3 have members that are highly receptive to infographics and will share them with all of their followers. Digg is also a good site to post to, but some experts are starting to feel that Digg is too saturated with infographics. If your infographic is business related in any way, it could also see success if posted to LinkedIn. Social media channels are a great avenue for sharing unique media, and infographics are consistently unique and new.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways to grow your traffic with infographics. As this series continues, I will suggest other great ways to utilize infographics to grow your business, your brand, and your revenues.