You’ve got your super awesome infographic with an eye catching design and bite size facts on your subject of choice. You want to introduce your creation to the whole wide world and get hundreds of links. Now what?
We’ve compiled some suggestions to implement a successful infographic linkbuilding campaign. Be sure to check out our previous post about best practices for creating infographics. Taking the following steps will help your infographic build links and benefit your internet marketing campaign.
Make it Easy to Share
Ideally, people will love your infographic so much they will want to share it with others. You can encourage visitors to partake in sharing by including these elements on the page where your infographic lives:
- Social Sharing buttons. Include sharing buttons for social media for Google +, Facebook and Twitter at the very least so people can share instantly. You may want to include embedded Facebook comments as well, which can display what people are saying about your infographic all in one place.
- Include easy to share embed code. Make it easy for people to share using your embed code by enabling them to select all and copy with one click. Place the embed code underneath the infographic, so it is the first thing people see after they finish looking at your creation.
- Submit the infographic to Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit with appropriate tags.
- Submit it to infographics galleries for additional links and visibility.
Give it a Good Name
Giving your infographic a good name that is both informative and appealing is key to gaining the attention of people who you send your link requests to. Make sure the URL where your infographic is includes its name for both usability and SEO purposes. Using good alt image tags will help add value to the links you receive from sharing. You can gain bonus link value if the title includes your target keywords.
Connectivity
Make it easy for visitors to view the rest of the content on your site by incorporating navigation on the page with the infographic, or write an accompanying blog post. Including keywords that link the blog post with the rest of the site will help signal search engines with the anchor text of the links. This will also help visitors navigate to other pages on the site if they wish. Encouraging visitors to browse other pages on the site can help keep the bounce rate low for the infographic’s page.
Linkbuilding: Send it out to the World
Hitting the ground running with the infographic is crucial to gaining exposure and links. The outreach aspect of infographic implementation is arguably the most important part in reaching your target audience. Hopefully, you already have a list of relevant blogs and websites with appropriate contacts to share your infographic with. You can either start by asking if they are interested in seeing the infographic before you release it, or simply send the page/post along with a description.
Identify top industry blogs and sites that reach a wide audience. Reaching out to the right audience can benefit your business in other ways than gaining links. It can help establish relationships and connections for future online marketing efforts. Once you have submitted a quality piece of content, they are likely to recognize you and be willing to accept and publish other future link bait as well. Reaching out for links with an infographic can encourage industry connections and brand awareness that could potentially lead to new business or collaboration.
Customizing e-mails by addressing the recipient by name or adding specifics helps the e-mail feel less like template-y. Since infographics have gained significant popularity, I usually list the subject as Infographic: Title of the Infographic. A good title can be important to gaining the attention of your recipients, and can help you succeed in having your link request e-mails opened instead of ignored.
I usually request that the recipient notify me if or when they choose to share. Most of the time, they will reply and send the link. Other times, they will simply just share and not respond, which brings us to the next point.
Watch it!
Set up a Google alert for the infographic. Most people who share will link back to your site using the embed code, but others will just do the ol’ fashion right click and save without giving proper link credit. I always ask that people link for credit with the embed code, but some people don’t. Creating alerts for the title of your infographic, as well as a branded alert will help you watch for cases of sharing without giving proper link credit.
Alerts give you the chance to approach them and request a link to get the maximum benefit from the infographic. There are also tools that automatically check and detect new links to automate some of the work of finding instances of people sharing your infographic.
So, there you have it. Hopefully these tips will help your infographic gain the exposure it deserves.
