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Infographics are an excellent tool that we've been doing a lot for our clients and even
for our own internal efforts. For SEO to basically create good, viral, sharable content and ultimately
drive inbound links and traffic from other websites to yours. This has a lot of really
great benefits and we're going to walk into what they are, how we build them and why they're
successful for our clients and why they'll be successful for you.
What is an infographic? It is quite simply a fun, visual representation of, it could
be data. It could be text but it's a visual representation of information. The benefits
are very straightforward. You’re going to drive traffic to your site which everyone
loves. You’re going to drive links which are really the heart of really jumping your
organic, your SEO rankings.
We have link building benefits. You’re going to find people linking to them from twitter
and from facebook. You’re going to find people posting so you can see the rise and
fall of yahoo infographic posted on techcrunch. You’re going to see the LA times picking
up an infographic on foursquare. This is a little bit daunting but this is sort of the
way that we visualize the process. The infographic behind the infographic if you will. It starts
out in concepting and then you sort of in one half have the design where you have to
actually have a designer take the information you want to present and put it in a thematic
and fun and entertaining visual presentation.
On the other side you really have the PR. It's just because you build it doesn’t mean
that they will come and that's going to be true with a website and with things like infographics.
Finally the goal of course is traffic and links. We divide our infographic creation
into four major categories, educational, humorous, controversial and news worthy. We have the
design reflect that. We have an educational here, one on jet lag and we have a humorous
one on the truth about farts which was an infographic that got a tremendous amount of
press and virality. We have controversial ones and then you have newsworthy. This is
just sort of topical in newsworthy.
Once you've created your infographic the next step is you need a platform in which to easily
share it because basically what you're doing is creating content that you're giving away
to other people and the implicit sort of arrangement by giving them away this content is that they
link back to you. They send you traffic. They send you links. They say thank you. To make
it really easy to facilitate this we'll create a page something like this. This is an infographic
distribution page and this is part of what we do for clients when we do an infographic.
You can see here we have the title of the infographic. We have a smaller version of
the infographic on the left. You have a description on the right. Then you actually flat out give
the copy and paste code that they can just paste on their website or blog and links not
only to the infographic image itself but also has a link back to you and those links are
what's so valuable when it comes to SEO.
You’ve created the infographic. You’ve created the page that sort of that platform
to share and finally we're going to move into seeding and distribution. You can do press
releases. They don’t have a huge amount of benefit but they're cheap and easy so it's
always beneficial to do it. The meat of really getting it out there is going to be personal
reach out. When we do infographics for others or for ourselves we identify a list of bloggers
and writers and news outlets that might really benefit from basically like the content that
we created for them. We did one for advertising in the super bowl and we built the old infographic
and then the night of the super bowl we reached out to a bunch of sports outlets and advertising
outlets and did this on a real one to one basis.
Then finally go out and blog. Blog on your own blog. Blog on other people's blogs. The
fact is you've created something that if you've done it correctly its great content. It’s
interesting in its own right so you don’t have to beg, borrow, steal to get those links.
You use twitter if you want to tweet about it. If you want to talk about it. If you have
email lists of your clients or customers or friends. You get it out wherever you can.
A quick case study that we did. We made this infographic that actually became quite famous
called the which female tech influence are you? It’s kind of a fun parody on silly
women's magazine's quizzes. Who’s the man for you and ultimately the goal of this is
to highlight some really successful women in technology Maryssa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg
and Caroline McCarthy and so forth. It was done in kind of this fun parody. The interesting
here is it got a lot of really controversial results. Some people loved it. Some people
hated it. Some people thought this set back the women's rights movements. Others thought
it was cute tongue in cheek and made a point.
For us it really was the more people talked, the more people found it controversial, interesting,
got in arguments with others about it. They set the message boards on fire in twitter
into a tizzy. That’s all great for us. It was more links. It was more traffic. Ultimately
we got picked up by techcrunch and then CNN picked it up on the homepage of their technology
part of their website and they basically picked up the controversy about the infographic was
their story got picked up by fashion blogs, tech blogs, news sites and in the end of it
we've got a considerable spike in traffic, 17,000 page views with average time on site
of nine minutes, a massive increase in traffic, so really, really successful, tweets from
really relevant industry leaders.
All in all kind of an exceptional story but a real kind of eye opening into this power
of creating good content and then giving it out to other people.