As the head of content creation and SEO over at Designbysoap Ltd, a significant chunk of my weekly activities is spend producing and promoting infographics for our clients. We've had infographics commissioned to be used for a variety of purposes, including public awareness campaigns, personal CV's, teaching aids, brand recognition, and everything in between. The vast majority of them, however, are produced with one key goal in mind: to increase backlinks to a target website.

So with that in mind, here's my in-depth guide to making the most out of your infographic, framed from the point of view of gaining the highest level of distribution (and therefore links) as possible.

It's worth noting that the concept, research, and design phase are extremely important in gaining links from your infographic - all the promotion in the world won't help with an infographic that people simply aren't interested in (or one that features a poor design concept). However, as this post will focus on promoting and pushing your infographic, I'll have to assume that you've got an infographic that's worth promoting. If you're still at the content creation stage, then my previous SEOmoz post might help you create something worthy of being shared.

Encouraging Sharing

You need to ensure that you make your infographic as easy to share as possible, which means ensuring that social media sharing buttons are clearly visible on the post - have a look at the social media buttons at the bottom of this post for a good example.

If you're publishing your infographic on a high profile blog then this probably won't be an issue, but if you're publishing on your own blog, make sure you're making it as easy as possible for your visitors to share the infographic via social media platforms. You should also include a clear call to action at the end of your post, something along the lines of 'if you enjoyed our infographic, please consider sharing it using the buttons below!'

Similarly, you should make reposting the infographic and linking back to you as easy as possible, and the best way to do this is to supply a HTML embed code. An embed code will not only provide people with an easy way of re-publishing your infographic, but it will ensure that they link back to you (via an image link) and allow you to control the anchor text. If you're not too hot with HTML, I'd recommend you take advantage of a simple but very clever tool from SEOGadget; their HTML embed code generator.

This tool will allow you to input your infographic URL, the title, your preferred anchor text and your link URL and then it will generate a HTML code that you can use on your own site.

Even with an embed code, some people will inevitably repost your infographic without providing a credit link back to you (they will just save the image and re-publish on their own site). We'll have a look at one way of dealing with this later on in the post, but just because someone isn't linking back to you doesn't mean you can't ensure you get credit for the content (and improve your brand recognition in the process). You should always add some kind of branding to the infographic to make sure people know where the content came from - now this doesn't mean plastering your logo all over it or relating everything in the infographic to your brand, but you can add a small, unobtrusive logo or standout URL at the footer of your infographic, like we did for the WordPress infographic for the Yoast website:

You can also add a QR code to the footer of your infographic, which is particularly useful if you're going to be using them in the real world, but we'll cover this in a bit more detail later on in the post.

International Links

As you would imagine, the vast majority of links you'll gain will be from English speaking websites, but that doesn't mean you should ignore international links. Getting your infographic translated into other languages can hugely increase the number of inbound links your infographic gains for your website, and it's not particularly difficult to do. This is particularly worthwhile if your infographic includes information that would be interesting or valuable to countries other than the UK or the US, which is probably the case with a huge number of infographics.

Here's an example taken from the Destructoid website; the Guide To The GamersUniverse infographic in English:

And in Chinese:

(Note these are just sections of the infographic, to see the whole infographic follow the link to the Destructoid website above).

If you're lucky enough to have someone on staff who speaks more than one language then great, but generally you'll need to source people who can translate the text in your infographic for you. You could use an online translation tool such as Google Translate, but these translations aren't always accurate, so you're probably better off using a platform like Upwork to source a translator.

Once you have your translated infographics, you can start promoting these alongside your English version - you could have links from your original publishing site to versions in different languages (for example click here for Spanish version, click here for Chinese version, etc), as well as targeting internationally based website for further placement of your infographic.

While you're getting your infographic translated, you might also want to consider getting the translator to provide you with text you can use to Tweet out links to the foreign language version of your infographic (in the target language).

Active Link Building

Encouraging people to link to or share your infographic is one thing, but that doesn't mean you can't continue the process of active link-building after your initial infographic publication. In this section we'll have a look at some of the ways you can build links to your infographics, and increase the likelihood of it encouraging further links.

The easiest way to build links via your infographic is to submit it to the numerous infographic distribution portals available, almost all of which will allow a credit link back to the original designer or publisher. To help get you started, here's a quick list of sites that allow infographic submissions (thanks to Paddy Moogan and Doug at Pixel Design Studio for helping me out with a few extra sites for the list):

Visual.ly
Cool Infographics
Infographics Showcase
Amazing Infographics
Daily Infographic
Infographic Journal
Cloud Infographics
Infographic Post
Infographics Archive
Infographics Inspiration
Infographr
Infographics Bin
Infographicas
Video Infographic
OMG Infographics
Love Infographics
Fuck Yeah Infographics
I Heart Infographics
Infographics Online Directory
Infographic Heaven
Infographipedia
Best Infographics
Pure Infographics
Daily Statistic
Brandless Infographic Blog
The Infographics
Chartporn
Infographic Love
Info-graphic

Another great way to build links to your site via the infographic is with guest blogging - many people think that they can't continue to post out an infographic once it's been published, but this simply isn't the case (after all you're relying on other people continuing to post the infographic with a credit link back to you). As the infographic is an image, it doesn't count as duplicate content, so as long as you're writing unique copy to accompany the design with each guest blog, you're still using a perfectly legitimate technique and you don't need to worry about duplicate content. Find a list of sites that are in a relevant niche to your infographic topic, and start sending out some emails requesting placement of the infographic. For each person that accepts your request, write a brand new description / post to go with the infographic and get it published - as long as you're not duplicating that copy, you can repeat this process over and over again, gaining more and more links each time you do so.

If you don't have a network of blogs you can get in touch with, or you simply don't have the time for manual blogger outreach, you could consider using a service like MyBlogGuest, which has a specialised infographic guest blog section (we actually suggested this to them some time ago, so it's nice to see a service that really listens to their market). The MBG infographic section allows you to supply numerous different descriptions for one infographic, each of which will be available for bloggers to publish - if you're unfamiliar with MyBlogGuest and you're interested in link building via guest blogging, infographics, or both, I suggest you check it out via the link above.

It's also worth submitting your site to relevant content aggregation networks - there's not much point including a list here as it depends on your niche, but as an example, an infographic on SEO, link-building, or social media would be well suited to inbound.org.

You can also create a detailed press release around the infographic and submit it to platforms such as PRWeb, which will allow you to link back to the original publication.

Reformatting Your Infographic For Other Channels

Static infographics are phenomenal for building natural links to your website, but by going one step further and reformatting your infographic, you're ensuring you can get the most out of it in terms of inbound links and referred traffic.

One of the best ways to reformat your infographic is to animate it, which allows you to target video distribution platforms in addition to infographic submission sites. If you're lucky enough to have someone on staff who can use Adobe After Effects (or a similar program), then you can do this in-house, or you can hire an agency or freelancer to do this on your behalf (you'll need to supply them with the working file, which will most likely be in Illustrator or Photoshop format). You might even find that your infographic design agency can complete this for you (at Designbysoap Ltd we now offer this as an additional service), in which case it's always best to allow the original designer to animate it.

To show you the sort of thing you can do with the already finished artwork, here's a short animated infographic taken from the piece we designed for BusinessEnergy.com, entitled 'UK Business Energy Costs'.

Original infographic:

Animated Infographic:

Having the infographic as a video will not only increase the likelihood of people linking to you (as you can offer them two different ways of sharing your content), but it allows you to utilise high authority video distribution channels such as YouTube and Vimeo.

Another excellent way of reformatting your infographic to encourage natural links is to make your infographic interactive, although admittedly this is again an additional step forward in terms of the skillset required. An interactive infographic not only helps set your design apart from the scores of other infographics out there, but can dramatically increase engagement and social media sharing.

You should obviously host the infographic on your own website, and utilise either Flash or HTML5 to achieve the desired effect. An excellent example of an interactive infographic is the Future Of Car Sharing, which does a phenomenal job of portraying the information whilst keeping the user engaged and entertained.

Another idea for reformatting your infographics is through a smartphone application - admittedly this could be potentially expensive, but there are companies out there who will turn your content into an app for free, in return for a cut of future profits. Infographics can make a good app too, particularly if you can come at it from the right angle - a good example is the Great War 100 app, which portrays genuinely interesting information about the first World War through infographics, and given we're approaching the 100 year anniversary of the conflict, it stands a good chance of making lots of sales. We actually supplied the infographics for this app, which you can see the advertisement for below:

Another good idea, particularly if you have a long infographic with lots of different stats, is to chop it up into slides and turn it into a slideshow (in either PowerPoint or PDF format) which can then be uploaded to platforms such as SlideShare or Scribd.

If you have released infographics previously (particularly if they're all in a similar industry), then you could also consider turning the infographics into an e-book, which can be sold on platforms such as Amazon, or distributed free of charge via your website. If you are considering placing it on your website as a free download, then consider using a service such as Pay With A Tweet, which will allow you to provide your e-book to visitors in return for a Tweet promoting the content.

Social Media

As well as doing your best to encourage sharing around your infographic, you should also make the effort to promote the content yourself via social media and bookmarking platforms. Obviously you should promote the infographic via your own (and your staff's) Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and StumbledUpon accounts - particularly if you have fairly strong profiles on those platforms.

When you're promoting your infographic via Twitter or Facebook, rather than simply saying 'check out our brand new infographic,' consider taking individual statistics from the infographic (preferably the most attention-grabbing or surprising stats) and posting them out individually. We've found this tactic to be much more effective at encouraging click through rates (particularly from Twitter). In addition, don't forget to include relevant hashtags with your Tweets, as this can help widen your reach beyond your normal friends and followers, giving you a better chance of reTweets and referred traffic.

If you don't have a strong social media presence, then you could consider utilising a social media promotion agency, although this will of course increase your budget for project. With that said, however, the harder the content is pushed via social media the more likely you are to gain links from a varied selection of sources. If you do decide to take on a social media agency to help with promotion, make sure you check their previous campaigns, clients and results, as you'd be surprised at the number of 'agencies' who simply use paid services like Fiverr in order to push social media metrics.

It's also well worth completing some manual outreach in order to try and gain traction via 'influencers' in your industry, as if successful, this can have a dramatic impact on the number of social shares and links. Let's say for example you've produced a high quality and well researched infographic on how social media links affect search engine optimisation - why not try and Tweet people like Rand (SEOMoz), Joost (Yoast), or Richard (SEOGadget) and see if you can get them to share your content. Employing this kind of outreach might not result in any responses (depending on your content and how you get in touch), but it takes very little time or effort and can yield phenomenal results if an influencer does decide to help promote your infographic.

You can also further increase social media engagement by incentivising sharing - let's say you've produced a beautiful infographic that you know will be particularly popular amongst a certain market (gamers, just for example). Print out ten copies of your infographic and say you'll give them away as a competition prize - all people have to do to enter is share the infographic via Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ and the winners will be picked at random from those who've shared the content. We've used this kind of competition-entry format for clients in the past to great effect and it's certainly worth considering for promoting your content or increasing your social media brand traction.

Email Promotion

If your brand sends out regular emails to mailing list subscribers (like SEOmoz do with their monthly Moz-Letter), then be sure to include your infographic in your mailouts - place a small, eye-catching section of your infographic in the email with a link back to the full version on your website. This can not only increase traffic, but encourage both social media sharing and reposting (and therefore links).

Real World Marketing

This is often overlooked by agencies and brands looking to promote their infographic, but it's something that when done right (and combined with a link to an online presence, most notably a QR code) can be fantastic for increasing brand awareness and mobile traffic to a website.

Let's look at an actual example from one of our campaigns from last year. One of our clients is a luxury, five-star guesthouse in the city of Brighton, UK, and as part of their marketing campaign we produced an infographic on tourism in Brighton and Hove. As well as promoting the infographic online, we also printed physical copies of the infographic and placed it in relevant part of the City, including the local tourist office. We placed a simple QR code at the bottom of the infographic that allowed people to visit the website by scanning the code with their smartphone:

Infographic section via The Claremont Hotel Brighton (click the image if you'd like to see the full infographic).

Not only did this result in a dramatic increase in website traffic via mobile devices, but did a great job of improving overall brand awareness in Brighton. As an added benefit, we noticed that people were also talking about the infographic and posting photos of it on their social media profiles, increasing the number of social media links pointing at the Claremont website.

Admittedly, this technique isn't always suitable for infographics, but it's well worth bearing in mind if local customers are your primary focus.

Chasing Down Other Links

Now that you've produced your infographic, reformatted it, pushed it out to as many different platforms as possible, and promoted it via social media channels, it's time to chase down a few extra links by finding website who have reposted the infographic without a credit link.

The easiest ways to do this are with a standard Google search and taking advantage of the drag-and-drop function on the new Google Image search. Start by searching for the title of your infographic (as well as a few variations) and visit every website you find that has posted the content - do the same with the image search function, by dragging your infographic from your desktop into the Google Image Search.

This will give you more publishing sites, allowing you to create a list of sites that have reposted your content. From here you can visit each one and note down the URL and contact information of any site that has published your infographic without linking back to you, then simply email each one with a polite request for a credit link. Sure, some webmasters won't reply to you, but you can gain a few extra links by doing this with every infographic you publish.

So that's it for my infographic link-building post - did I miss anything? Do you have a useful tip for gaining additional links from your infographic design? Let me know in the comment below and I'll do my best to respond to every comment.

Post by John Pring, head of SEO and content creation at Designbysoap Ltd.