How to Promote an Infographic

Infographics have emerged as a sound, white-hat way to generate high-quality natural backlinks. Even a moderately successful infographic can go viral and bring a few dozen high-quality backlinks. But creating an infographic—as much work as that is—only gets you halfway there.

If you cleverly promote your infographic, you can greatly increase your chances of going viral and generating higher numbers of backlinks. We know because we’ve done a fair amount of infographic development here at TastyPlacement.

The Quid Pro Quo of Infographics

The name of the game in infographic promotion is that a webmaster gets to display your hard-earned content (the infographic) and in return, you earn a backlink from the website displaying the infographic. A preliminary task in promoting your infographic is to place your infographic where it is easy to find and in a manner which is easy for webmasters to employ.

Set Up Your Infographic “Home”

First, pick a “home” for your infographic—this ideally should be the same site where you want to send your backllinks. Your home location will house the infographic itself (1000 pixels wide is fairly standard), and ideally an “on-page display” version for the page itself for faster loading and easier visibility on a typical webpage (about 540 or 600 pixels wide), a mini-thumbnail for Facebook shares (more on this in a minute) and of course, your recommended embed code.

Your embed code should be dead easy for any webmaster to simply grab in a block. The embed code should be simple html, and should contain the entire “package” for the infographic: the on page display version, a link to the full infographic as well as author attribution and your desired links.

When we promote infographics, we host the preview image and the full infographic—it’s just too complicated to ask webmasters to download the infographic, install it on their site, then update all the links. By hosting the images, you make it easy and idiot proof. Because we are hosting the infographic, and the files are large, we create our infographics in jpeg format: that allows us to compress the file down for faster loading and less bandwidth usage.

To see all these elements coming together on a proper infographic “home.” see the page we’ve set up for our “Science of Sleep” infographic here:

http://www.medicalwebsitedesignpros.com/free-infographic-the-science-of-sleep/.

Include a Facebook-Ready Thumbnail

You will also notice another element on that page: a square thumbnail of the infographic at the bottom of the page. We added that thumbnail to our infographic page after we learned that when someone posts a share link on Facebook, Facebook will search the page for roughly square-shaped images to offer as a thumbnail choice to represent the share. Because infographics tend to be very tall images, Facebook won’t generate a thumbnail from the full infographic. You have to hand-feed an agreeably-sized thumbnail.

Now Let’s Promote: Make it Searchable

With our infographic set up and set to share, you want to make sure your infographic can be easily found in search engines. Make sure you’ve got the terms “free” and “infographic” in your title tag and body copy. “Free infographic” is searched 2900 times a month in Google, as reported by the Adwords keyword tool.

Finding Webmasters With MyBlogGuest

The popular guest blogging resource, MyBlogGuest, has recently launched an infographics gallery that connects infographic providers with webmasters. It’s currently in beta, but we imagine it will stick around. You’ll need at least the $30 a month pro account to promote infographics there. And, you’ll need to write separate descriptions for each webmaster that elects to display your infographic (which you want anyway so that you control both the quality of text surrounding the infographic and so the text isn’t duplicate content). This method is a sure bet for links because MyBlogGuest has hundreds of webmasters trolling for infographic content. We secured 15 high-quality links in about a month with a recent infographic we posted there.

Promote Through Social

Promote your infographic through your Twitter account with #free #infographic hash tags. Include a shortened URL with a link to your infographic home. You should also post a link to your personal and business Facebook pages. We think it’s ok to re-post an infographic every few weeks.

Promote through Infographic/Visual Graphic Directories

We promote our infographics through infographic and visual graphic directories. These diretories exist for the purpose of displaying and housing infographics. You’ll get a mix of dofollow and nofollow links from these directories, and you’ll get the chance for webmasters to find you there. Below is the list of sites we employ (Visual.ly is easily the most popular and authoritative of this group):

• http://www.infographicsarchive.com/submit-infographics/
• http://submitinfographics.com/
• http://infographicsite.com/submit-infographic/
• http://visual.ly
• Reddit.com/r/infographics/
• http://www.nerdgraph.com/submit-infographic/
• http://www.infographicfile.com/
• http://www.infographiclove.com (this is a paid submission)

To find more locations for submission, try a Google search for (keep the quotes) “Submit Your Infographic”. That query will yield sites with infographic submission forms.

Use Specialized Searches to Find Bloggers and Webmasters

If you really want to take your infographic promotion to the next level, you can do a little curation of specific websites. This technique is going to take a bit more time, but will generate the highest value links.

First, let’s search for existing sites that display infographics. It makes sense that a webmaster that already displays infographics would probably post another in the same topic area. For our sleep infographic, we think our content would be valuable to sleep doctors. So we enter a Google query as follows: “sleep doctor” infographic. This query led us to a few sleep doctors and mattress and pillow manufacturers that already display infographics. One mattress manufacturer has an active blog with a PageRank of 4. We’d like to get a link on that site, so the next step is to write an email to that webmaster. So, we wrote the following message:

“Hi, we were browsing the site __________.org, and we notice 
you display Infographics for your readers. We have a useful
Infographic on sleep science that you can display for free
on your site. We've already coded the HTML so all you would
need to do is paste in the code to your website. You can
find the Infographic here: [link to infographic page/embed
code]. 

If you have any questions about how to post the Infographic
on your site, please let me know. “

Good luck using these tips in promoting your infographic. If your infographic is attractive and useful to readers, you should have have no trouble in ultimately generating 100s of links.