The Best Content Marketing Infographics on the Planet
Posted on 23. Feb, 2012 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, content marketing, Fun Stuff, infographics, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Okay…I get it. Infographics are in. Especially ones for content marketing and social media.
As I’ve been popping back and forth from Pinterest to Facebook to Twitter viewing them all, I thought it might be helpful to put the best content marketing infographics all in one place. At the same time, I was wondering how long a blog post could actually get (this one sets my personal record for scrolling).
I hope you find this collection of infographics helpful…and, if you have other ones to add, please let me know in the comments.
The History of Content Marketing
Like this infographic? Get more
content marketing information from the
Content Marketing Institute.
22 Ways to Create Compelling Content
Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.
The Anatomy of Content Marketing
The Content Marketing Explosion
Content Marketing vs. Traditional Advertising
Storytelling vs. Corporate Speak
The Hoffman Agency is a public relations firm that emphasizes storytelling in business communication.
The Content Grid
Content Marketing Challenges
The original post is titled The Best Content Marketing Infographics on the Planet , and it came from The Content Marketing Revolution .
5 Reasons Pinterest is Addicting and 4 Weaknesses That May Kill it
Posted on 19. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, infographics, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social networks
Like Google searches for M.I.A. after her Super Bowl middle finger salute, the growth of Pinterest is positively ferocious. A 329 percent increase in unique visitors in 90 days is the kind of rocket ship acceleration that is usually far more myth than reality, even in social media start-up circles.
Why this newfound obsession with Pinterest? What’s fueling this rocket? There are actually several factors and features that have made Pinterest on par with Twitter as a traffic driver (according to a Shareaholic study).
1. Focused Functionality
Unlike many other contemporary social environments that seem hell-bent on adding features like ornaments on a Christmas tree, Pinterest does one thing, and does it well. They have embraced the less is more ethos that initially propelled Google search and Twitter to the forefront of their respective fields.
2. Intuitive Interface
Ease-of-use is the killer app. Pinterest would never have crossed the chasm to become the darling of the often non-technical crafting and fashion crowd if it was a hassle to figure out. It’s drop-dead simple, possibly because of its focused features, as is impacting Web design best practices in widespread and profound ways.
3. Passion Pit
Pinterest allows us to chronicle and share what we love. Our hobbies. Our desires. Our aspirations. I don’t have data on this (it would make an interesting study), but I’d wager a considerable sum that there are 10x more pins of things we want, compared to things we have. It’s akin to the Facebook “like” phenomenon, but with a far more visceral psychological anchor.
4. Massively Browsable
You can enjoy Pinterest without reading anything. Let that marinate. In a world where the tweet and status update have reigned supreme for years, you can now can fully immerse yourself in a powerful community experience that is 100% visual. It’s no wonder that Pinterest broke out at roughly the same time as Instagram, Path, and other social sharing opportunities that revolve around pictures, not words. (see post from Ekaterina Walter on whether photo apps will kill the written word) It’s the natural evolution of communication. A picture may not be worth 1,000 words, but it’s definitely worth 140 characters, and when the vast majority of the population began possessing a camera at all times via their mobile phone, this type of photo-driven culture was a natural byproduct.
5. Equality
There are no Sneetches with stars and Sneetches without stars on Pinterest. Brands have pages and access to the same features that individual users have. This democratizes the community in an important and powerful way, making Pinterest the only major social opportunity (other than Twitter) where people and companies are singing from the same hymnal. Strangely, Twitter aims to eliminate their edge in this area by rolling out brand pages to companies.
Is This The End of the World as We Know It?
Those are the five primary reasons for Pinterest’s success. But I advise that you temper your passion for Pinterest, as there are four reasons why the site as we know it today may not survive.
1. Link Spam
One of the digital marketing advantages of Pinterest is the fact that all links on the site are followable by Google and other search engines. On a pin, the from link, the image link, and even the description link (if you insert one) are all followable by Google, passing juice back to your site. This is too good an opportunity for SEO pros to pass up, and link spam on Pinterest will pick up significantly in the next few weeks. Pinterest will likely have to change links to no-follow, or risk SEO spammers dragging down the quality of the user experience.
Image From llsocial.com
2. Shopping Spam
On a related front, the affiliate marketing opportunity on Pinterest is astounding. Already, you can set up an API feed of Amazon’s top sellers (or other products) onto a Pinterest board, create a potentially lucrative, automated revenue stream. This is going to explode soon, with a potentially overwhelming number of low quality, affiliate boards cropping up like mushrooms. Even Pinterest itself is getting into the act, inserting affiliate links automatically wherever it can do so, using Skimlinks. Again, this commerce-first shift may threaten the idyllic user experience that has made Pinterest successful.
3. Copycats
The fact that Pinterest is so focused is terrific (see #1 above), but also makes it far easier to copy it’s offering. Like daily deal sites aping Groupon, Pinterest is massively prone to other sites chipping away at its user base by creating more relevant offshoots. Already, you see clones like Gentlemint.com vying for the “Pinterest for dudes” audience, and angel investor online community Angel List includes several companies that describe themselves as “Pinterest for Architects” “Pinterest for Beauty” and so forth.
4. Too Good to Stay Solo
The most likely reason that Pinterest as we know it today will disappear is that it’s simply too ripe for acquisition. Suitors are plentiful, as Pinterest makes tremendous strategic sense for many social behemoths, but for different reasons.
Google could buy Pinterest to add pins and repins as a social signal for photos, serving as a de facto +1 for images and adding an entire new layer of relevancy to Google images search results. It would be a tidy add-on to Google Plus as well, and give it a meaningful advantage over Facebook.
For that matter, Facebook could buy Pinterest and make it the core of its still nascent social shopping efforts, giving Facebook pages an easy way to monetize “likes” at the product level.
Twitter could buy Pinterest and make boards and pins part of users’ profile page, taking today’s uninteresting ”Recent Images” to an exciting new place.
Groupon could get into the game, using what you’ve liked and pinned as a relational database to improve the relevancy of deals you’re offered.
Certainly, in the interest of possessing a revolutionary new social commerce front-end, Pinterest would be attractive to Amazon, and probably eBay as well. Even Wal-Mart – which has quietly been getting very serious about social - would be an interesting and viable candidate.
I’m not a crafter or a fashionista (my first Pinterest board was favorite tequilas, and my most popular board is social media infographics), so I don’t fit the profile of the typical Pinterest freak. But, I love and very much appreciate the site for the five reasons I’ve mentioned. However, for the other four reasons I’ve articulated, I fear our relationship will be short-lived.
What do you think?
(post originally published on the Monetate blog)
Infographic Marketing Tips: 11 Ways to Promote
Posted on 19. May, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, content marketing, infographic marketing, infographics, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Infographics are a hit with online marketers this year and as more companies hire designers to artfully represent data in creative and engaging ways, many fall short when it comes to infographic promotion. It’s the old “great content will attract it’s own audience” scenario. As I’ve always said, “Content isn’t great until someone shares it.”
While there are many other smart posts about creating compelling infographics to attract attention, links and traffic, the information on promoting that type of content seems a bit light. If you’ve invested in creating great infographic content and need advice on how to promote, here are a few ideas:
1. Involve credible sources in the data collection and then encourage those sources to help you promote the resulting graphic.
2. Create a blog post for the infographic and support promotion through the blog’s social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Email, social news & bookmarking sites)
3. Segment the infographic into screen shots which can be used in blog posts and shared on image hosting sites like Flickr with links back to the main page hosting the full infographic. A week or two after publishing and promoting the infographic, upload the full image and unique description to Flickr with a link back to the original web page.
4. Schedule tweets of specific data points mentioned in the infographic over time with a link back to the full infographic. 10 data points/statistics = 10 tweets. A similar, but more conservative approach can work with Facebook as well.
5. Submit the infographic to aggregators and directories. Here is a short list:
- http://dailyinfographic.com/
- http://www.coolinfographics.com/
- http://www.infographicsshowcase.com/
- http://submitinfographics.com/
- http://www.infographicsarchive.com/
- http://www.visual.ly/ (not live yet)
6. Promote the infographic with an article/news release that includes a link to the full infographic and distribute through a news distribution service like our client PRWeb.
7. Highlight the infographic in an email promotion to your in-house prospect and/or customer list. Include a segment of the graphic and a link for readers to see the full image on your website or blog.
8. Pitch relevant industry bloggers and media on the story behind the data included in the infographic. Focus on relevant, personalized emails and offer previews or pre-release opportunities for more influential sources.
9. Share the infographic with influential users of social news & bookmarking sites: StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, or Digg. Or enlist a connected social media marketing service to do it for you.
10. Create a screencast video version of the infographic and promote through YouTube and other video hosting services.
11. Deconstruct the infographic into a PowerPoint and PDF document and share on Slideshare, Scribd, Docstoc and other document hosting services.
Additional tips that can help promotion include: Make sure the file name includes relevant keywords as well as the text on the web page used to describe the infographic. Social sharing buttons on the page that hosts the infographic should be easy to see and use. Include a text area form element with code that users can copy to embed the infographic (with link back to your site) on their own website or blog.
Obviously there are many other ways to promote and re-purpose great content. I have to say, at TopRank Marketing, we’ve had many opportunities to develop our content marketing and promotion skills as well as content re-purposing. It’s an essential part of an efficient marketing program.
If you’ve been successful at marketing content through infographics, what promotion tactics worked best? What additional ways do you think infographics could be useful on their own or as part of a coordinated content marketing effort?
Profile of a twitter user Infographic courtesy by GDS Infographics, on Flickr
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
Infographic Marketing Tips: 11 Ways to Promote | http://www.toprankblog.com
Connect With Us Here:
