So you followed everyone’s advice about moving away from manipulative practices and created an amazing infographic (make sure it’s great and relates to your industry) to get great links and exposure. Remember infographics should be used as a branding and authority building tool so stay away from optimized anchor texts and stick with branded and safe anchor texts. Now that you have this great piece, you may begin to realize that making a great infographic is just a waste of effort if nobody sees it. Even if it holds all the secrets of the universe and the meaning of life itself, you might be wondering why it doesn’t get picked up as easily as you might have thought.
Consider the question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”. This philosophical thought experiment perfectly describes the seminal state of your infographic: Whether it is great content or not becomes a moot point if it doesn’t get any exposure! (Remember your goal is exposure not just links).
The bottom line is, when placed in the context of an SEO, you really only need to be concerned with one thing: when a tree falls, you shout “TIMBER!” until your lungs give out!
There are tactics you can use to maximize the effectiveness of your campaign. Here are some tried-and-tested “squeaky-wheel” techniques that worked best for us to get links and exposure.
1. Contact sites and try to get them to co-brand your infographic with you or ask them to provide data for your infographic. Offer to put their logo on your infographic as a co-producer of the piece. For sites that have never done an infographic it’s a great way for them to test it with ought spending the money and producing by themselves. Once you get the right partners involved, they are sure to feature your piece since it will also mean exposure for them. This will guarantee success even before you start.
2. Once you have a working version of your infographic, reach out to industry experts in your niche and ask them for ideas to help you make your infographic better. Chances are if someone helps you with it, they will be willing to help push it as well. It helps to let them know that you recognize them as an authority in their field in your pitch, but don’t flatter. You’re just giving them a valid reason why you are soliciting their opinion and that you didn’t pitch to them solely for the purpose of getting a link or social mention.
3. Offer your now-complete infographic to sites in your niche an exclusive early release for them to break the news before everyone else gets their hands on it. Make sure you offer it to sites you’ve done business with, had collaborations with or those who responded positively to you in the past this helps your pitch get answered. Another option is to reach out to sites that have featured similar infographics as yours and offer them the exclusive on this one. Everyone wants an exclusive opportunity to break the story or news of great piece of content to the world.
4. Post it on your site with a embed code and main social buttons for easy linking and sharing. This helps sites easily post it to their sites with a link to your site and your anchor text. Putting the social buttons on the bottom of an infographic as well can increase the sharing since the user doesn’t need to scroll back up. You can even put embed codes in the embed codes as Paddy Moogan mentioned at mozcon.
(Be carefull with the embedded anchor texts Matt Cutts is watching.)
5. Submit your infographic to infographic sites and sites that love infographics like mashable. These sites provide you links and the ability to diversify your backlink profile some can even generate nice traffic and exposure for you. An infographic we did generated over 500 visits to our site just from these types of sites alone. We find as well a lot of the sites around the web that featured our infographic pulled the embed codes form these types of sites. A list can be found here but a simple search can revel tons of these lists.
6. Send out a press release about your new infographic report (both paid and free). This is a great way of getting links and can even generate traffic and exposure that will hopefully send your content viral.
7. Reach out to blogs in your niche or sites that have featured similar infographics and let them know about your new infographic they can share with their readers. It helps to pitch your infographic as an educational resource or a useful reference since it sounds like a compelling reason for them to post your infographic on their site. More and more sites are now asking for payment to post your content so try to find the editors to pitch not the main contact form on the site.
8. Submit it to social networks & bookmarking sites: Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, etc. These sites can launch you to viral numbers really quickly if posted from strong accounts to the correct categories so do your research before you post. We have found pinterest and stumbleupon to be those most effective traffic drivers for us as they love great infographics.
9. Pay or negotiate for some influential sites in your niche to “feature” your infographic with embed code. Leverage banner ad purchases or any other resources you may have to make this happen. This will push other sites to follow. In the end you’ll get more than what you paid for.
10. Submit guest posts to sites with your infographic as a focal part of the piece explaining the data and message. This is a great way to get started with guest posts. MyBlogGuest has a great infographic section you can submit your infographic to if your goal is getting links from many sites this is worth the cost. The fact that you have to include descriptions means that you can add more unique content to complement your piece.
11. Be ready to run StumbleUpon ads to your infographic. We spent $200 and got 2000 stumbles that led to 139k stumbles for one of our pieces. You can run ads on Reddit, Facebook and Twitter as well (but these aren’t as effective as StumbleUpon ads).
12. Turn your infographic into a video and submit it to video sites. Cut it up and submit it to flicker and photo sites or even make it into a pdf and submit it to slideshare type sites.
13. Incorporate it into your retargeting and banner ads for Branding. This is a great somewhat costly way to get your user base to read and spread your infographic. Would love to hear from the community how this method works for you.
14. Search for similar infographics and look at the backlinks using tools like Open Site Explorer. Another great way is use Google Image Search on infographics similar to yours to find sites that have posted those infographics. Comment on those related infographics and give yours a mention.
16. Post the infographic on strong forums within your niche and ask forum members what they think about it. Engage and encourage discussion to make the thread popular, but don’t be spammy.
17. Hustle. Just reach out and push it as hard as you can!
Using infographics should just be piece in your link building arsenal. Don’t use this as your bread and butter! Remember, the Big G loves diversification.
For more info on infographic devaluation, check out this post by Justin Briggs
I would love to hear in the comments what methods worked best for you to promote your infographics!
David Konigsberg – David is the director of search for Optimaltargeting.com and focuses on PPC, SEO, and Social Marketing
