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 “Austin Startup Scene” infographic here:
https://tastyplacement.com/start-up-infographic
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
[update] When we originally posted this thread, we recommended MyBlogGuest as a means of reaching promotion-minded webmasters. We no longer recommend MyBlogGuest as a responsible means of promotion.
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.
Another promotion strategy would be to use Fiverr. You want to post your infographic on StubmleUpon and then buy a gig or two on Fiverr to “Stumble” the post.
Here are a couple of high PR sites to syndicate your infographic:
BuzzFeed.com
Flickr.com
Imgur.com
Reddit.com/r/infographics/
Tumblr.com
This post was really informative and useful. I wish I’d seen it before I wrote an article about infographics… next time!
Good resource! :-)
Visual.ly
Is also I really good one too!
I’d love if you could feature our infographic directory nerdgraph.com. Check out the submission page: http://www.nerdgraph.com/submit-infographic/ and if you like it add it to the post.
Thank you in advance,
Angel
Hi Claire
I would like to suggest a site for infographic submissions if that’s ok:
http://www.infographiclove.com
Thanks
Shelley
Hi Claire,
Here is another free infographic site for your readers:http://www.InfographicSubmission.com
Thank you.
Nice tip about the Facebook thumbnail. Without that Facebook will grab any image it can from within a post, which may also include the captcha code for a contact form – as I’ve seen before!
Hi,
Here is another free infographic site for your readers:http://www.infographicszone.com/
Thank you
Ok, thanks for this…
How do you create the recommended embed code? I have posted an info graphic on my blog and I think I put it in correct with the “alt tag” and page tile you recommended but I don’t know how to get the code so others can post my infographic on their site…
FYI this is a great blog post. Really helped out. Plus the site links above were helpful. Looking forward to posting my infographics on them.
You just have to code it yourself. Look at one of our samples for guidance. Then you can test whether the HTML code works by taking your code and trying it out on one of the “online HTML testing tools”, just search that phrase in Google.
Thanks Claire for this excellent overview. Much appreciated!
Thanks Claire for this great article, it’s very useful and actionable.
Hi guys, Here’s a PR5 Infographic site that’s currently accepting submissions:
http://artsdigitalera.com/submit-infographic/
enjoy!
NIcely explained, thanks…
Thanks Claire for such a brilliant blog post, you can also add another site for infographic submission:
http://infographicb2b.wordpress.com/
This is the blog I’ve just created to showcase well-designed, quality infographics in b2b marketing and technology.
Keep up the good work!
Catherine
As per my personal experience, If your infographic is attractive and captivating you will get the natural shares. The other webmasters of the same industry will also share your infographic and it is a best way of branding your business online.
Thanks for this, it’s exactly what I needed. I was thinking about creating an infographic for my site and this post really cleared things up, especially about the hosting, embed code part as well as promotion. Heck, I didn’t even know about infographic directories. Now I’m pretty confident I can pull it off.
Hi Claire, some excellent infographic promotion tips listed here. We like turning infographics, especially cartoon themed ones into videos, this is another excellent way to drive traffic.
Great thanks for letting us know how to promote our infographics! very useful.
I would suggest staying away from myblogguest at this point. The bots are not happy with them.
Good point. That site is toxic right now.
Interesting article Michael. We use infographics a lot at our agency, and we have also discovered that outreaching them properly is half the battle. We agree that by promoting your infographics, you give it a much larger chance for success.
Thank you so much! I had no idea you could submit your infographic.