We’ve been developing infographics for clients for a while now and have had tremendous success in using them to build up strong backlinks for SEO campaigns. Infographics make for a very non-threatening, non-invasive way to ask another website owner for a link.

Rather than your outreach email to a webmaster being perceived as, “Hey, look at me, link to me!”, it comes off as, “Hey, look at this cool picture, I think your readers would like it”. That eliminates a lot of the doldrums of link building.

But, a new problem comes along with creating infographics: they are hard work. It can be difficult to gather large volumes of statistics, data, and facts to build the narrative that you are trying to achieve with the infographic. Sometimes the research doesn’t exist, other times it is hard to find data to support your point; and even when the data exists, it can be difficult tracking it down.

Take the following infographic for example. It covers the success rate of day traders, and let me tell you, this data was hard to come by. When the topic hit our idea board, we all thought the statistics would be readily available, but it just wasn’t. This is the output of our research:


Online Trading Academy Reviews from OnlineTradingAcademyReviews.org.

You’ll notice that the infographic isn’t particularly long, either. We boiled it down to just the best data and presented that.

Now what if I told you that there was an easier, more straightforward way to create something like an infographic that packed the same SEO punch without the same upfront work? Too good to be true? Nope.

Instructographics!

We’ve been working on creating instruct-o-graphics lately. These are visual representations in the style of infographics, but instead of the focus being on research and statistics, it is based on a list or a set of steps. We’ve found that these are equally effective in obtaining links for SEO campaigns!

Instead of doing a lot of original research, for many of these, we can just create 90% of the content easily ourselves and then just ask our client or a subject matter expert to fill in the holes and make sure everything is ok. Take the instructographic below, for example. It took about 2 hours to develop the content for it before handing it off to our graphic designer to build it out. A typical infographic take 16-24 hours of research, so we are talking a dramatic savings in time spent here.


Academic Advantage Infographic by InfoCarnivore.com

Top 10 lists (and the like) are very popular these days, and the concept of instructographics is to turn those lists into visually beautiful images that people can’t resist sharing. It is a hybrid of top 10 lists and infographics, if you will.

So next time your SEO campaign needs a breath of fresh air, give this technique a shot!