I have this weird drive in me to create infographics. It’s such a unique, visual and even beautiful way to display information. Best part of all, it’s a great way to attract natural backlinks manufacture backlinks to your site!
In this post I will walk you through the steps to creating a killer infographic for your website and then using it to do outreach and create backlinks. Infographics are great way to attract backlinks to your site for a few different reasons.
Why are infographics awesome for SEO?
- There are tons of free and paid infographic directories that will publish your infographic with a link back to your site.
- People love infographics and love sharing infographics so this makes your job a little easier
- When you create an infographic and share it, it can appear that you’re actually being helpful, providing entertainment, and people are more eager to link to your site when if you asked them to link to your Amazon product laden affiliate page, they might not be so eager to give you exposure.
How to Create an Awesome Infographic
Since you will be using this infographic to do outreach with you will want to be sure that your infographic is unique yet relevant to your site. It should also have information that is interesting to people. Some infographic ideas are:
- (#) Things You Didn’t Know About _______________
- How to ___________ in (#) Easy Steps
- The Exciting History of ___________________
- The Beginner’s Guide to ___________________
Once you have your idea it would be wise to sketch a simple outline of what information you would like to include. You may also want to fill the outline in with information so that you can give it to your designer or so that the design process will go more smoothly.
Design or Outsource Your Infographic
Now it’s time for the design. You have two options: You can either design the infographic yourself or outsource it.
Outsource Your Infographic
If you have no design skills whatsoever and/or don’t have an Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop license, then I suggest outsourcing it. We’ve used two different infographic gigs on Fiverr and both gigs were good. In order of preference the gigs were from siconsultants and jo7654320.
Create the Infographic Yourself
I am one of those people that frequently caves into doing things myself rather than outsourcing, but I also enjoy design for the most part so it is somewhat relaxing for me. For the most part just do a Google search for “free infographic templates” and you should come up with some decent options… most will be either .PSD or .AI files. Here are some additional resources to get you started.
Piktochart – Create your own infographics for free to $29/month
infogr.am – Create your own infographics for $15/month
Canva – Another infographic creator
Top 45 Free PSD Infographic Elements
20 Free Infographic Templates PSD Download
Submit to Infographic Directories
If you didn’t already know this, there are dozens and dozens of infographic directories where you can submit your artwork. For the most part, every directory will want a 75-250 word unique description, so it might be wise to write something around that length and do some manually spinning on it using TheBestSpinner. It will be worth the effort up front so that you can post to tons of directories before running out of steam. You can also provide the original source URL of the infographic so that they can provide a link back to your site.
How to Find Infographic Directories
If you simply search “free infographic directories” you will likely find numerous outdated lists of sites that are no longer free or simply no longer exist. Do the same search but adjsut the date to only include things published in the past year.
You might want to start by submitting to all of the high DA sites first as those will pass on more link juice.
Do Outreach to Bloggers / Websites
Next you will want to do some outreach to bloggers and websites. While you could waste a lot of time finding blogs by searching “niche blog”, you could also be more strategic about your approach.
What you will want to do is jump over to Visual.ly and find popular infographics in your niche. To do this, type your niche into the search box and then sort the results by “viewed”. For this example I typed in “health” and found “40 Facts about Fitness” that has 66,000 views.
Open the infographic, right click on the image and select “copy image location”.
Next you will want to see what other sites have linked to this infographic because there is a high likelihood they would be interested to linking to yours as well. To do this you will search by the image URL. To do this, once in the image search section, click on the little camera and paste in the image URL from Visual.ly.
You will see pages and pages of sites that have linked to the infographic you specified. Many of these will be Pinterest URLs but there will be some gold in there.
Above is what appears to be a niche-relevant blog that posted this infographic recently and has a DA of 26. That seems pretty legit, no? You will want to pull out all of the sites you can find that are similar. Then, send them a simple outreach email saying something to the extent of:
Hey (name)!
I just created an infographic about (niche – specific topic) and since I see that you’ve linked out to infographics of this type before, I thought you might be interested in sharing this one as well with your audience?
The original source of the infographic is: (source URL)
The embed code is as follows: (include the full embed code which contains a link back to your site)
Thank you for your time and I hope you have a great day!
You will likely find some really powerful, niche-relevant sites with this method that have DA 50-70+. You will likely find old roundup posts with infographics in your niche. You can always offer $50 for them to include your infographic in the list. $50 for a permanent link on a powerful site is a bargain, and could incentivize them to make money on a post that is otherwise just sitting there covered in dust.
Spread Your Infographic on Pinterest
A few natural social signals, extra traffic, and putting content out there so that it can be linked to nautrally never hurt anyone, so jump on over to Pinterest and spread the love.
My little secret…
Unless you are a true Pinterest-whore, you probably don’t have that large of a following on your personal account, and if you create a new account then you will have even less of a following, so you will want to pin on group boards.
How do you do this? You need to first find them and then ask to be invited to pin.
PinGroupie is a Pinterest group boards directory that will help you out tremendously. Type in your high-level niche, sort by number of followers, and open those boards in new windows.
To be invited to the board you will first need to follow the board and then message the creator of the board to be sent an invitation to contribute. You can find the username of the creator in the URL: http://pinterest.com/username/board-name
While some owners request that you send them a personal email (they usually list their email address in the board description in this case), most will get the message if you comment under any pin on the board… just include @username in the comment to be sure the yare notified. Simply ask if they are still accepting contributors to the board and if so that you would love an invitation 
Use your head… don’t spam. Just post things that are relevant… like your infographic!
Do this on as many boards as you feel like, reposing your infographic to each. By having your infographic in front of thousands and thousands of viewers on Pinterest you should get tons of likes / repins, traffic to your site, and may even catch the eye of people looking for content and infographics to link to on their blog.
Conclusion
So in conclusion, there are many ways to use infographics to create backlinks. Just start with quality content, a quality infographic, spend time out reaching and have a little patience. You may find that you only have a 25% success rate (or less) of people that accept your infographic. If you can afford to get into some paid infographic directories that can be smart as you will have a guaranteed placement for usually a low cost.