These days, the Internet is completely overloaded with information. If you’re looking for a quick and effective way to grab the attention of your audience, the answer is in eye-catching and informative infographics.

An infographic is 3 times more likely to be shared than any other type of content, especially if it has a catchy headline. Not to mention that visual communication is one of the most effective ways to create valuable site content and to explain your services or products.

Creating great content that works is not easy, so let’s take a deep dive to find out how to create killer infographics that truly engage your audience.

The importance of infographics

According to Wikipedia, an infographic is a visual representation of information, data, or knowledge, made with the intention to present complicated information quickly and clearly. 

Research shows that different visuals — infographics, charts, color designs, and images — increase the readership by 80%. No wonder infographics are still widely used among businesses: 65% of them spend a minimum of 10% of their budget on visuals.

Here are a few reasons why:

• Give your website a visual boost: People are likelier to notice and remember an image than a bunch of text.
• Enhance content shareability: A well-designed and relevant infographic can easily start a conversation and engage your audience on another level besides “just” sharing and liking. Make sure to embed visible social media sharing buttons, as well as an embedding code button.
• Raise your brand awareness: Your brand name, website URL, and logo should all be included in the infographic. That way you give the audience the opportunity to check your whole site, like and follow your social profiles, and, hopefully, use your product or service.
• Great for SEO: Each share and mention on social media gets you “points” in search rankings. If another site or blog picks up and shares your infographic in a separate article, that’s an even better linking opportunity.

Remember, the attention span of an average online reader is really short — only eight seconds — so it’s a good idea to use infographics and other visuals to grab their attention as fast as possible.

What makes a good infographic?

In order to design a marvelous infographic your audience will find easy to digest, you have to bear in mind the main characteristics of a good infographic. 

• Visually appealing: The main idea of creating an infographic is to gain someone’s attention with visual content.
• Follows good design practices: Sticks to one certain style and color scheme; text and background have a nice contrast; features enough empty space, etc.
• Has a nice flow: Every good infographic should have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Ideas and points should be presented in a logical order. Separate sections should be easily recognizable.
• Has a purpose: Every content piece you create should aim to accomplish something and target a certain audience. Otherwise, why would you even spend resources creating it?
• Includes relevant sources: Many infographics contain multiple statistics, but not all of them contain the sources section. Readers will want to know where have you pulled your statistics from, especially if you refer to them to suggest which actions they should take.
• Gives proper attribution: This is the upgrade on the last point. If you have used copyrighted graphics and facts found on other blogs, let the readers know that. It’s also great for link building — just email the owner of the blog your infographic once it’s done, and they might share it!

For some examples of what makes a good infographic, and for some inspiration, take a look at Point Visible’s infographic portfolio (scroll to the end of the page).

How to make a good infographic

Creating an infographic on your own demands a certain set of skills. The obvious one is graphic design, and the less obvious one is research. You can do both by yourself, depending on the amount of time and experience you have; you can also outsource them and let experts do the work for you.

Outsourcing isn’t free, of course, but sometimes it’s better to let someone else do it rather than try and fail yourself — especially if you already have some kind of reputation and a big following.

For the purpose of this article, let’s move away from spending a lot of money, and try to do the infographic ourselves. It’s not that hard, and you will certainly feel more accomplished once you’re done and your infographic is looking great! 

Here are some simple steps in the process of creating an infographic by yourself, from scratch.

1. Find the best topic for your infographic

Your choice of topic is the most crucial decision when creating killer infographics. What’s the best way to find topics for your infographics, you might ask?

First of all, you need to identify the objective of the infographic project. Consider whether you are looking to:

• increase communication with your target audience
• increase traffic to your site
• drive sales 
• or something else

Once you’ve answered that question, you should be able to find a great topic to get started on your infographic.

If you need additional help, the following are some important points that should help you to pick a topic for the infographics.

1. Focus on your target audience: Your content must provide valuable, focused, and useful information to your target audience. For inspiration, check social media, Q&A sites, and forums, to see what your audience is talking about.
2. It must be simple: Do intensive research and organize your data into different categories. Select a topic that is catchy and engaging for your readers. Don’t use long or complicated concepts as a topic.

Incorporate statistics into your infographics: Including statistics will help a reader trust your brand. You can find an area to include an interesting statistic in every topic — let’s check the Statista example below.

2. Collect the required data and information

Once you have chosen a topic for the infographic, collect all the necessary data and information. The selected data must be valuable, reliable, and accurate. 

There are several different ways to find the data for your infographics:

• Check the databases of government agencies and universities (many of them provide public access).
• Examine tax records by contacting the township assessor’s office.
• Search historical records such as the historical society or the university library.
• Conduct in-person research or interviews to find the facts and details.
• Read books, maps, and almanacs, whether online or paper versions.
• Explore the Internet and review multiple online sources to find the required data.

These additional sources will help you get any data you require quickly and efficiently:

• gov
• UN data
• Google Public Data
• Pew Research Data 
• World Bank
• World Economic Forum
• Statista

Explore as many of these sources as you can, and find all the relevant data you need before moving on to the next steps.

However, don’t borrow all the information — make at least half of your data unique and from your personal experience (like tips and tricks you learned, or your readers shared with you). If you decided to revive an old article of yours, a lot of research has already been done, but make sure you check for any new information to add in.

3. Create a rough infographic draft

The next step is to create a rough draft of your infographic based on the available data. This draft should contain your ideas, statistics, and outline. 

It is going to be faster to draw a draft on paper instead of using some customizable tool. Paper sketching will help you brainstorm your ideas in a flexible and fluid way. 

Take enough time to plan your infographic; having a strong and well-thought-out structure helps the reader understand every detail, and helps you manage large infographics with a lot of data to include.

Here are some important parts of the structure you must not forget when creating an infographic:

• a strong and catchy title
• an introduction that briefly summarizes your infographic
• section subheadings that identify the different sections within the infographic
• chart and graph labels to help display your data clearly
• sources and footnotes about your data sources.

4. Create a wireframe

The visual representation of your infographic’s structure that covers basic design elements is known as the wireframe. 

Before you start with the design process, you can create a rough sketch of the infographic on paper or in digital format (there are many apps for creating a mockup for website design and app development, and you can also use these tools for wireframing).

In this step, you should decide on the elements you need, and where they should be placed. Your wireframe is an excellent way to create a visual roadmap, and lets you know how your text and data will be illustrated. It also helps to determine at which point you have to grab the attention of the reader with visuals.

If you are working on a client’s project, then a wireframe is the clearest way to show them the work in progress. It is way easier to make some changes now, instead of after the infographic is almost finalized. Crafting your wireframe properly is the best way to ensure it contains all the elements you need.

The following elements must be a part of your wireframe, and almost all infographics follow this structure:

• spaces for title and introduction
• rough renderings to show data visualization like graphs and charts
• rough placement of data
• a rough estimate of illustrations that will be used in infographics
• spots for section headings
• fonts and color palettes.

5. Choose a color scheme and fonts

Infographics must be eye-catching and attention-holding for readers. A color scheme and a font type can bring forward or obscure the information on the infographic.

To ensure good readability, always make sure the contrast is on point. Colors should complement the content, text, and any images you have included. Here are a couple of options for choosing a color scheme for your infographic.

1. Choose a color from the company’s logo or a website design as a base color. 
2. Use free online tools to choose the best colors. The most common tool for this is the Paletton (formerly, Color Scheme Designer). This free tool will give you plenty of options to help decide on your color scheme. You can also try out Colormind, an AI-powered color palette generator.

When it comes to fonts, they have to be sharp and easy to read. Yes, an infographic is very visual and you might be tempted to use one of those „fun“ fonts, but the text needs to be readable and simple, especially the text explaining the charts. 

Have a different font for titles and for paragraphs. Sometimes it’s good to go with the same font for all types of text, but play with its weight — make titles bold, paragraphs light, and similar. 

You can find great fonts on FontSquirrel — they are mostly free and you’ll find pretty much anything you could need; other sites you could use are dafont.com and 1001freefonts.com.

6. Design the infographic

Besides creativity and feel for the design, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are the most powerful weapons in a designer’s arsenal. Their ability to manipulate pixel and vector-based art is unparalleled, and their robust set of features can help you create impressive infographics. 

The downside is that they are expensive and take a fair bit of training to actually get to a level where you can use them efficiently. If you’re on a tight budget or lacking design experience, check tools like Piktochart, Venngage, and Canva — much simpler to use than Adobe or Illustrator, but the results will still be stunning.

Creating every element in an infographic is not feasible, and it consumes a lot of manhours. So the designers will often modify stock images and downloadable vector images, rather than create everything from scratch.

With a quick Google search, you can find plenty of directories from which you can download stock photos and vector images. One of our favorites are:

• Freepik — a great source of amazing graphics, with both free and paid options
• Storyblocks — similar to Freepik, with a free 7-day trial
• Vectorstock — offers over 960,000 free vectors you can choose from, or you can pay for even more.

Whether you choose to design your infographic yourself or enlist the help of a graphic designer, bear in mind that the overall design should tell a story and complement your brand look.

7. Promote your killer infographics

Now that you’ve done your infographic, and double-checked spelling and all information, you are ready to share it around. 

Since infographics are images, the text on them can’t be crawled by search engines. Your job is to simply copy and paste all the text from the infographic, and format it so it looks good in the post (don’t forget to embed the infographic — usually at the end, but it’s not a rule).

Make sure you write down the image description and alt tag for the infographic, for on-page SEO. It’s a good idea to include an embed code, in case some of your readers want to share it on their own site, and link back to you.

A user-friendly infographic with rich data will have the ability to be republished on other sites in the same niche.

The next step is to upload and share the infographic on all your social media. To make sure you acquire a decent amount of backlinks for your infographic, try the blogger outreach process.

All outreach processes usually start with prospect collection. Sites that have already published similar infographics are good places to pitch your infographic. To find these kinds of sites you can use the ‘reverse image search’ function on Google.

Here are some steps to do infographic outreach effectively:

1. collect the website URLs from Google reverse image search
2. collect contact email addresses 
3. create an outreach template
4. use an outreach mailer service (Mailshake, Hunter, Pitchbox, or something similar)
5. send some polite follow-ups until you get your first response (maximum 2 follow-ups; don’t irritate others by mailing them repeatedly)

You can also reach out to many infographic directories that allow publishing your killer infographics for free or for a small fee.

Before we jump to the conclusion, here’s an eye-catchy infographic we made a couple of years ago — which happens to summarize all the things we mentioned above.

Grab the attention of your audience

With the emergence of new technologies and social media, there is a drastic decrease in the attention span of viewers, and more people prefer visual elements over written content.

An infographic is the best method to convey large data clearly and precisely to your audience. Because of its small size and compatibility with mobile devices, we can say that the infographic is an ongoing trend in the content marketing industry, one that will lead to its success in the coming years as well.

If you’re lacking experience or inspiration in creating your infographics, reach out to Point Visible and they’ll gladly help you.

Cibin is the Content Marketer and Outreach nerd at TechWyse. He loves to create growth hacking strategies and spending time on researching the internet for the ways to automate day jobs. When he is not doing this, you can find him with the nature exploration and hiking teams.