Effective 5 Steps Guide to Link Building with Infographics

If you’ve been involved in online marketing for some time now, it should come as no surprise to you that infographics are one of the best ways to draw traffic. Infographics have the potential to increase web traffic by 12 percent, and according to 32 percent of marketers, visual images are the most critical kind of content for their businesses.

Infographics are incredibly useful at building links, mainly because they serve as an intersection between manual link building and traditional marketing. They’re engaging and are quite successful at telling stories. If you’re like to present your information in a concise, yet visually-attractive manner, infographics are the way to go.

So, how exactly can you use infographics for link-building? Here’s how:

Step 1: Researching Your Content

Researching is crucial for any content you’re looking to create, and infographics aren’t an exception. Every kind of content, research needs to involve two primary questions: what are your competitors doing and what’s working with the target market?

While many marketers know how to make a basic infographic, they aren’t quite sure how to make one for SEO. Since an infographic is a visual content, chances are trial and error, and infographic made on a random whim will build links successfully.

Your data needs to be relevant and up-to-date, and you can ensure that by using quality sources. You can use the following to find useful data:

  • Statistics from official sites, such as NGOs, governmental agencies, and global bodies
  • Research firms who publish studies in a variety of fields
  • Authority resources in your target niche
  • Other public sources

You can also choose to conduct your research by opting for an online survey with in-depth questions and getting a few hundred people to answer it. If you don’t have time to do this yourself, you can always get an external service to do this for you.

Step 2: Get the Graphics Right

The next step involves translating your research into visual content or, simply put, something people would want to look at. You need to opt for visuals that will deliver information effectively. Such visual tools include:

  • Vector art and icons
  • Illustrations and photos
  • Graphs and charts
  • Animations

These visual tools need to complement each other to focus on the main ideas of your data. You should keep the following in mind:

  • Choose the first image carefully, since it serves as a visual headline for the infographic and can make or break your infographic. If people don’t end up sharing your infographic, you won’t have any links.
  • The flow of images needs to tell a story. One of the ways you can ensure you achieve this is through storyboarding.
  • The design should be consistent and straightforward. You can choose to use a variety of background for different sets of data and use the same format for your graphs and charts.
  • Figure out what colors will complement each other using a color palette resource.
  • Guide your reader to different sections using shapes, colors, arrows, and lines.

You can always turn towards existing infographics to see what works best. They may even give you format ideas for you to experiment with.

Step 3: Write Compelling Text

While you may have the research and visuals in order, you don’t have anything until you nail the story. Although the infographic wouldn’t contain a lot of words, each one needs to be spot-on.

The writing part usually covers headings and subheadings for different sections, ways to highlight the facts, and call out and caption information. The title, in particular, should interest people enough that they’d want to click.

More importantly, though, you need to create a narrative by highlighting the following:

  • Why you chose to cover the topic
  • What data you uncovered
  • What you concluded
  • What challenges you experienced
  • What your next steps are

It’s essential to create some context for your infographic and provide something to talk about to those who engage with it. For maximum presence, share the story behind the infographic on your blog with social sharing buttons.

Step 4: Share Your Infographic

Infographic marketing is a crucial part of building links. For starters, you should include the embed code, so people find it easy to post your infographic on their websites.

Other ways you can share your infographic include:

  • Share the infographic on social media and use relevant hashtags to make it easy to find. Don’t forget the platforms Reddit and Pinterest, both of which are excellent platforms for your infographics.
  • Submit your creation to an infographic directory. All you need to is to embed code and write up a short description.
  • Email it to your target audience using one of these effective email outreach tricks.
  • Extract critical data from the infographic and publish it on other social media posts.
  • Reach out to the resources referenced on your infographic; they’ll be happy to share it and provide you with authoritative inbound links.
  • Contact other authoritative sites and blogs in your niche.

Step 5: Tracking and Following Up

Once you’ve designed and shared your infographic successfully, it’s time to see whether your efforts have worked on not. Analytics software is a great way to determine whether your infographic is attracting traffic and who are leading people to your site.

If your results haven’t met your expectations, you should check how the infographics measure up against a quality test. You should also consider diving through your backlink data to see if authority sites are linking back to you.

If you’ve managed to make a top-notch infographic, remember the world needs to know about it. An excellent infographic isn’t going to promote itself; you need to tell people about it.

Infographics, whether they’re created as stand-alone content or part of an overall campaign, should be included in your SEO arsenal. Compared to other forms of content marketing efforts, infographics still haven’t been used enough to be considered overused. Regardless of how saturated they are, though, they’re worthy of being explored.

Have you tried any of these link building steps? Or do you have some recommendations of your own? Sound off in the comments below!

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Marcus Svensson: Marcus Svensson is a Growth Hacker at Albacross, a B2B lead generation platform, that shows you which companies visit your website. Passionate about creating value, human connection, and positive impact. You can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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