You’ve got that blog post written. Your title is click-worthy and on point. You’ve got your accompanying visuals, in the form of pictures, gifs, or diagrams. You know what keywords you’re going to target for SEO. Okay, one last thing: do you have an infographic?
Why do you need an infographic? Okay, you don’t always need an infographic, but I’m going to tell you right now, it doesn’t hurt. Infographics are like putting a hat on before you walk out your front door—you don’t need one, but a lot of the time it’s practical and also adds a little something extra to your outfit.
Was that too much? The point is, infographics are a useful addition to your blog post.
Chances are, if your blog post is done right, you’ll have included sub-headers and images to make it easy for readers to quickly find the information they’re looking for. An infographic that summarizes the information in the post with quick, actionable points will have you finish with a solid set of content. Infographics are also an easy way to repurpose your content and make it shareable. They do very well on Pinterest, for example. You can also pull sections from an infographic and make smaller graphics with one chart or graph that you can post to Instagram.
Unless you’re a graphic designer, you might feel stumped when it comes to deciding how you want to lay out your information. You want your infographic layout to be intuitive and easy to follow. Here are the four steps to finding the right infographic fit for your blog post.
THE 4 STEPS TO FINDING THE RIGHT INFOGRAPHIC FIT
STEP 1: CHOOSE THE RIGHT TEMPLATE.
Beginning with an infographic template is a great way to ease into the creation process. Once you have a clear format for your infographic, you can personalize it by changing the colors, images and accents, and aspect of the layout.
An important thing to remember when creating an infographic from content in a blog post is that infographics are generally not text heavy, meaning you will need to pull only the very key and central information from your post.
For example, if your infographic outlines a process, you have a couple of options. The most popular process infographic I see around follows a step by step format. Each step in the process is organized into its own section. This layout is very intuitive and makes for good quick reference sheets. You could also use a flow chart infographic, which shows how a process is streamlined. This is good for depicting business processes, career mapping, or scenarios with multiple outcomes. A timeline infographic works in the same way, but with a focus on how the lifespan of a process.
If you want to present statistical findings, you will want to use a template with a combination of graphs, charts, and pictograms.
STEP 2: BRAND IT.
If you use a template for your infographic, it’s important that you take steps to personalize it and make it your own. This could mean inserting your blog or company logo at the top or bottom of the infographic, using your site’s primary font, your brand’s color scheme, or importing your own images rather than just relying on stock photos (if you have the opportunity to use original images, do it).
The idea is not only to ensure that your infographic design is consistent with your blog’s design, but also will help your infographic be recognizable as a piece of content from your site, even if people come across the infographic somewhere else.
STEP 3: DECIDE WHERE IN THE BLOG POST TO PUT IT.
This step is easy to overlook. Many people will simply place their infographic at the bottom of their blog post as an extra little somethin’ somethin’ that summarizes the post for readers. The problem with this is that if your blog post is longer, people may not read far enough to even see your infographic. It’s a sad fact that 55% of people spend only 15 seconds on any given page. So if you’ve put the time and effort into creating a beautiful infographic, you want to make sure that people read it.
If your blog post is only 300-400 words long, you can get away with putting your infographic at the bottom of the article. If your blog post is more around the 1000-2000 word mark, then your infographic won’t be visible when you do the first bit of scrolling.
In our longer research posts on the Venngage blog, we invert the format and put the infographic at the beginning of the article so that it serves as an introduction, which we then expand upon in the body of the post. This ensures that readers see the infographic right away so that even if they don’t end up reading the whole article, they can still share the infographic with their networks.
STEP 4: OFFER AN EMBED CODE.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: if you’re not offering embed codes under your infographics, you’re missing out on an opportunity for more links back to your site. Look at it this way: you made the infographic because you want people to share it. Just including the image in a blog post is fine for augmenting the post itself, but if people want to put it on their own site, they’re either going to email you asking you for the infographic or they’re going to save the image and upload it themselves. They may credit you, but they may not, which fails to ensure that people will know to go back to your site for more.
But if you offer readers an embed code, you can include a link back to your site. People will be able to share your infographic but they’ll be encouraged to do it on your terms.
(That being said, you should also always put the url to the full blog post and any other sources you may have used at the bottom of the graphic. Even if it’s not a live link, people will be able to go to the blog post if they want to.)
GET CREATIVE!
Infographics creation doesn’t have to be scary—in fact, it can be really fun to find creative ways to visualize information. And in a fast-paced startup culture like ours, it’s good to have the skills to not only write content, but visualize it.
2. Link It – Once published, come back here and link it up.
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