The entire point of creating an infographic is to raise awareness, get more links, and drive traffic to your website. But, if you donít know what youíre doing and understand the best practices when it comes to infographics, you may make some very common mistakes. Before you create your infographic, understand what mistakes to avoid.
Forgetting about your audience
Like most marketing efforts, it’s always about your audience. Remember the rules of marketing: benefits over features. Tell your audience in pictures how this information affects them.
Lacking the ‘human touch’ through humor
The really great thing about infographics is that it’s a good opportunity to show your sense of humor if it’s appropriate. Naturally, use your best judgment regarding this factor.
Not looking unique
Don’t make an infographic just because everyone else is doing it. Instead, try to find a way to use infographics that is interesting and new and not look the same as everyone else’s.
Trying to convey too many ideas
While you can depict a lot of information in an infographic, be careful about trying to do too much at once. Choose one major point to get across to your audience and make your data revolve around that point.
Shallow subject matter knowledge
To avoid providing the same information that everyone else is providing, do your research into your subject matter in order to find the pearls of information that will make people think in a new way.
Sharing old stats
Everyone has stats and data, but if it’s not something new, or something viewed in a new way, what’s your point? If people view your infographic and say ‘so what?’, you have a big problem.
Not sharing your infographic
Treat your infographic as you would treat all your online content. Promote it. If you don’t share and promote it aggressively, your infographic will not get widespread views. Someone has to get the ball rolling.
It’s too big
You want to limit the size of your infographic to about 600 pixels wide and 1800 pixels long. In addition, you should compress the image so that it’s no more than 1.5 megabytes. Most people only give about 3 minutes to an infographic if you are lucky, so you want to keep that limitation in mind. Also bear in mind that people will be viewing your image through a small mobile phone screen, so make sure you use font sizes that are still legible when scaled down.
Using free graphics and clip art
They will look rubbish. Spend some money buying well-made graphics and stock photography for your infographic. There are some good websites that you can use like Stockfresh and iStockPhoto, or better still, commission a freelance designer to help you create one!
Be sure to plan your infographic out in advance. You want the entire story written up, the data facts checked, and to know what images you need to create or buy before the infographic is put together.