A few years ago, infographics were all the rage. Then as the hysteria died down, and access to affordable, reliable graphic designers became more and more scarce, it all went a bit quiet.

So what of infographics today, is there any value in them? We recently threw one together as an experiment. I’ll show you how we went about it and the all important results.

Coming up with a concept

The History of SEO

The first step in creating an infographic is coming up with a concept. As the majority of our client base are SEOs, it made sense to focus on this as a subject, as it is something that would generate interest with existing and prospective customers.

I decided on ‘The History of SEO,’ charting all of the main events and miletones in the industry in a timeline. I felt that this would be interesting enough for those within the SEO industry to read and share

Research

Once I had the concept in place, I started by looking at some other infographics from the SEO community and some of the information they had included. I then added to this with research from blogs and articles on SEO, including anything that I found to be relevant and interesting. All in all, this research took no more than a couple of hours.

Briefing

Once I had gathered the information that I wanted to include, and written the copy, I passed this on to a friend of mine, who is a graphic designer. He agreed to do this as a freebie on the proviso that if it was successful we would use him again in the future.

I gave a brief overview of what I was looking for, but I wasn’t too prescriptive in terms of the design, letting him put his own mark on it. He returned a couple of days after with a draft and after a couple of amends, we were ready to publish.

Top Tip: If you’re on a limited budget, approach a junior graphic designer who is eager to get a piece for their portfolio. If you offer them a share of the credit, they may be willing to work for payment in kind, or even free.

Publishing

We published the content on a new page on the site, on our blog, and to some aggregators such as Visual.ly.

Results

Since going live on the 7th November, our infographic has received almost 1100 views on Visual.ly, 58 Tweets, 9 Facebook Likes, 2 Google Plusses and 20 other shares.

The infographic was republished by several sites in the UK, as well as blogs in the USA, France and Germany.

Summary

With the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets, presenting information in an easily accessible way is a great way of reaching out to people. For this reason, it should be part of every content marketing plan. If done well, it’s also a valuable tool in the SEOs armoury for attracting backlinks.

Do you create infographics as part of your content marketing and SEO campaigns?