Infographics marketing: when they earn links and when they don't

Three things happened at once. Google's Penguin update on April 24 penalized sites with unnatural link profiles, so SEO firms needed a new way to earn links. Pinterest grew to more than ten million US users in record time and rewards tall, visual content. And a crop of tools, Visual.ly, Piktochart, infogr.am, Easel.ly, made production cheap enough that anyone can call themselves an infographic agency.

The result is a flood. Publishers who ran every infographic they were sent in 2010 now receive dozens of pitches a week and ignore most of them. The bar for getting placed has risen while the price of making one has fallen. That gap is where budgets get wasted.

Run a proposed piece through these before design starts. If it fails two, change the idea.

1. Is there a real finding? The best infographics are built on data you own, a survey you ran, or public data combined in a way nobody has shown. "Ten facts about coffee" pulled from Wikipedia fails. "What 2,000 of our customers told us about their morning routine" passes.
2. Can you name twenty sites that would run it? Not "mommy bloggers" or "tech sites." Actual URLs, with the name of the person who edits that section. If you cannot list them, there is no distribution plan, and a piece without a distribution plan is a blog decoration.
3. Does it work at 600 pixels wide? That is the column width of most blogs that will embed it. Fine print and dense charts turn into mush.
4. Would someone share it without your logo on it? If the content only matters because it promotes you, it is an ad. Keep branding to a small footer with the source and a link.
5. Is there a story with a beginning, middle and end? Three to five sections, each with one point, in an order that builds. A collection of unrelated statistics is a chart dump.

The common mistake is spending the whole budget on design. A reasonable split for a $4,000 piece in 2012:

If an agency quote has no line for outreach, ask who is going to place it. If the answer is "we submit to 50 infographic directories," that is the 2010 playbook, and after Penguin it is a risk, not a service.

Publish it on a page that can rank. Give the infographic its own URL on your domain, with a descriptive title, 300 to 500 words of text summarizing the findings and listing sources, and the image itself. The text matters because search engines cannot read a PNG.

Offer an embed code, but keep it clean. Provide a copy-and-paste snippet that includes the image and a credit link. Use your brand name or the title of the piece as the anchor text, not a commercial keyword. Publishers increasingly strip or nofollow aggressive anchors, and Penguin has shown what happens to sites with hundreds of identical keyword links.

Cite your sources at the bottom. Journalists and bloggers check. A piece with no sources gets passed over.

Make a Pinterest-friendly version. Tall format, legible at thumbnail size, with the headline readable in the first 300 pixels. Pin it from the page on your site so the pin links back.

Prepare the pieces. Cut three or four individual charts as separate images for Twitter, Facebook and the pitch emails. Many publishers will run one chart with a paragraph rather than the whole thing.

Mass email to a purchased list of bloggers does not work and is a CAN-SPAM problem besides. What works is slow and personal.

• Start the publisher list before design begins, and share an early draft with five of them to ask whether it is interesting. Their feedback improves the piece and warms the relationship.
• Pitch by email, one at a time, with the person's name, a reference to something they wrote and the single most interesting finding in the first sentence. Attach a preview image or link to a private page.
• Offer exclusives to the two or three biggest targets. A 48-hour head start is often enough to get a yes.
• Follow up once, a week later. Then stop.
• Track every placement in a spreadsheet: site, date, whether the link is followed, whether they used the embed code or re-hosted the image.

Expect a 5% to 15% placement rate from a well-researched list. Twenty to forty placements from 300 personal pitches is a strong result for a mid-sized brand. A piece that gets picked up by one large site can triple that through secondary coverage.

Be honest about these situations.

• The budget is under $1,500 total. You can make something, but you cannot research, design and promote it. Spend the money on one excellent blog post or a small survey instead.
• The topic is only interesting to your customers. Publishers serve their readers, not your buyers. A piece about your product's features has no audience outside your funnel.
• Nobody internally will own the outreach. Design happens; promotion does not. The piece sits on the blog with 40 views.
• You need results this month. Research, design and outreach take six to ten weeks. Links accumulate over months after that.
• The idea is a copy of a piece that already went viral. Publishers remember the original.

Set expectations before launch and measure against them for 90 days:

• Referring domains that link to the page, from Google Webmaster Tools or a tool such as Open Site Explorer or Majestic.
• Social shares: tweets, Facebook likes, pins, tracked on the page itself.
• Visits to the page and what those visitors did next.
• Rankings of the page and related pages for the terms in its title.
• Leads or sales from visitors who arrived via the piece, using campaign-tagged links in the embed code and pitches.

A fair benchmark for a $3,000 to $5,000 piece with proper outreach: 20 to 60 referring domains, a few thousand visits and a measurable lift in rankings for a cluster of related pages. Compare that against what the same money buys in paid search in your category, and you will know whether to do another.

Discover, plan, build, improve. Discovery finds the data: what the business knows that nobody else does, what customers can be asked, what public sources can be combined. Planning picks one idea against the five tests, names the publisher list and sets the budget split before a pixel is drawn. Build is research, copy, design and the supporting page, produced by people who also handle the brand's broader identity so the piece looks like it belongs to you. Improve is the outreach cycle and the 90-day measurement, feeding what we learn into the next piece.

The connected part matters here. The research often doubles as a press release and a sales deck. The page is built to rank and convert, not just to host an image. The design system means the next piece costs less than the first.

The campaign described on our content work page is a representative example. A professional services client had plenty of internal data and no visibility among the trade publications its buyers read. We surveyed its customer base, turned the findings into a single long-form visual piece with a supporting article, pitched the editors of the publications on the target list individually and offered an exclusive to the largest. The piece was picked up by trade sites and bloggers over the following two months, the page earned links the client's service pages had never attracted, and the survey became the basis for an annual report. The decisive factor was the original data, not the illustration.