Infographics is a rather old school link building tactic. So does it even work these days?
Yes, it does, but..
The but is in the fact that most people that get your pitch will ask you for money. If you’ve done infographics, shotgun or regular skyscraper or any other link building tactic, you’ll know this.
However, why I still invest my time and energy into infographics is because:
- some people will actually just link to you without asking for money
- you can get links for less money compared to other methods
- easy to find highly relevant prospects
The Core Idea
You find an article (data-driven articles, listicles or how-to guides are the best for this tactic), that has performed well and has received a lot of backlinks. You then condense the information, create an infographic out of it and publish it on your site.
Then outreach to everyone that have linked to the original article and tell them that you have an infographic that covers the same topic visually that their readers might find useful and easier to grasp.
You then find all other articles on the same topic that have a significant amount of referring domains and get in touch with those linkers as well.
Average cost per link: $34
My Process
STEP #1 – Find a text-based article in your niche that has received a lot of backlinks
I use ahrefs content planner for this task.
Let’s say that you’re looking to rank a website in the dog niche. You go to the content planner tool and put dog or dogs into the search bar and hit enter.
The filters that I use to get better results are:
- Language -> English
- Referring domains -> From 250
- Exclude homepages
Now I just scroll through the results to find a topic idea where I assume an infographic would work better than a text based post.
The idea is that it’s way easier for people to digest visual content compared to a long form written article.
So if you have a listicle, a how-to guide or a data-driven piece of content, users will grasp the concept faster from an infographic compared to a 2,000 word article.
So from my example, what I found were:
- Beagle Dog Breed Information Article
You could easily create an infographic that covers the main information points in one cool image. The original article has over 1,100 referring domains, but it’s only 190 words.
There are loads of other dog breeds that you can cover, if you find that this particular infographic idea is working well for you.
2. Fruits or Veggies Dogs Can or Can’t Eat
If you’d check the post, it has almost no images. See for yourself:
Now, if you were to create a beautiful infographic out of it, I’m guessing a decent amount of those 675 referring webmasters would be interested to display your infographic instead.
Second Method – Site Explorer Tool
Once you’ve found or you can come up with a list of high DR domains in your niche, you can plug them into ahrefs site explorer tool. Then go to the “Best by links” report.
I’m using the site I found from our previous research – akc.org.. it’s short for American Kennel Club. They have a DR of 90 and they’re getting over 10M organic traffic per month, according to ahrefs.
From the above filters, put 200 for the HTTP code – this will get rid of all the irrelevant redirects.
Now here you’ll find a myriad of additional potential opportunities for infographics.
I’d recommend you to gather up 5-10 ideas and choose one that you think has the most potential. By potential I mean something that has a lot of referring domains and would make more sense as an infographic compared to a text-based article.
STEP #2 – Make or have the infographic made by a designer
First, gather up the main points from the article. Try to condense the information in a way that it would fit into an infographic so that the main points are stated but without too much text.
Then design the visuals by yourself or have someone else do it.
For doing it by yourself, I recommend using Canva.com. Their service costs about $12-$13/month and I get all my visuals from there. You’ll get a lot of options with just the free version as well.
Canva also has infographics templates you can use.
However, if you have the $100-$500 to spend on a custom design, your links conversion rate will be much higher. Usually, the more you pay, the better the design. I’ve tried different routes and found that $200-$300 is the sweet spot where I’m getting a decent amount of links at a reasonable cost.
Where to find good designers:
- fiverr.com – yes, they have a lot of infographics designers there, but make sure that you check through their previous work and make sure that what they’ve made before is something that you would be satisfied with. Fiverr has the fastest turnaround time. (I use this designer in particular).
- Upwork.com – you would need to create a job ad there, but you’ll find higher quality designers that cost more as well. Slower turnaround times, higher prices, but better end result.
- dribbble.com – the best designs I’ve come across, but they cost the most. If you want something truly spectacular, you’ll need to give dribbble a go.
I personally stick with fiverr.com. I found a vendor there whose quality matches Upwork’s levels and costs a little under $200.
STEP #3 – Get a list of people that have linked to the original article and reach out to them
Simply extract the referring domains, find their e-mail addresses and start outreaching to them.
BTW, I got this strategy from Neil Patel. He explains it briefly in his video here:
You’ll also get a template to use for outreach from him 🙂
Oh, and if you’ve already created the infographic, it would make sense to increase your list of prospects to as big as possible.
To do that, put the main keyword of their article into ahrefs keyword explorer and extract all other ranking articles backlinks as well -> add them to a single google sheet or excel file and remove all duplicates.
Here’s an example of the fruit and vegetables dogs can’t eat keyword:
Over 2K referring domains in total from the top 10 articles. That’s a good list of prospects to go after.
That’s it, happy linkhunting! 🙂
If you have any questions about this strategy, leave a comment down below.