Creating Explosive Infographics: The 7-Step Beginner’s Guide

One of the biggest problems with including infographics in your content marketing strategy is that the internet is virtually saturated with them, making virality a lot harder to achieve. If you’ve just created your first infographic and want it to stand out amongst the rest of the herd, I suggest that it meets the following criteria.

1. The information contained within your infographic doesn’t necessarily need to be original research, remember to always include your sources. Not giving credit where credit is due is tantamount to plagiarism. Ideally, try to include your own research or alternatively, collate data from several sources instead of just one or two.

2. Promoting your infographic is vital to going viral. Without strong promotional efforts, no one (and I mean NO ONE) is going to even know that your infographic exists, much less acknowledge its awesomeness. Make sure you post it on as many sites as possible, including your own. And when placing it on your own site, remember that it deserves its own landing page that’s optimized to be as search engine friendly as possible.

3. While it’s tempting to just collate a lot of data and find a creative way to visualize it, understand that the best infographics always lead up to a specific conclusion. Think about what the data means and the possible consequences that it could bring to light within a specific industry. It’s a good idea to treat an infographic like a research paper and develop a thesis statement before collating the data. This will help you place things in perspective and will allow you to form stronger, more meaningful conclusions. If the data indicates that your thesis statement is inconclusive, you can always tweak it to make the infographic present a more accurate picture.

4. Creating a kickass infographic takes hard work and a hell of a lot of creative expression – so remember to take credit for your work with a strategically placed company logo, replete with tagline. In fact, if you’d like to expand your branding initiatives, you could even use your signature company font and color schemes to help drive the branding nail home.

5. Use neutral data that isn’t biased towards your products or services. And absolutely avoid data that directly relates to your products and services. The goal of an infographic is to get shared and eventually spread itself all over the web so try to establish an immediate connection to problems or challenges in your industry (or your target industries).

6. If it’s too short, it simply won’t fly. And if it’s too long, it’s liable to come crashing to the ground. A good infographic strikes a balance between the two and strives to entertain and illuminate as much as possible within that space. A good way to ensure that your infographic is the right size is to eliminate or add superfluous data as you see fit. If the graphic seems too short you could also experiment with changing the style of flow and space things out a little bit more.

7. In tune with the above, make sure that your infographic doesn’t deliver too much information in a single glance. The idea behind an infographic is to promote understanding of a particular concept or trend by breaking it down into simplified, easy-to-understand segments and incorporating graphics that are appealing to the eye. Too much clutter will leave the viewer unsure about what to read first and can leave them with only a partial understanding of the subject under discussion.

I could go on and on about graphic design elements, the kind of content styles you may want to use, and a boat load of other factors, but that’s another story for a different day! Feel free to leave comments, suggestions and any other sort of contributions that you may have in mind!

Sources
http://www.soshable.com
http://www.esalesdata.com/