You’ve spent time studying and preparing your business performance statistics. Printed clearly in black ink on crisp white paper, stapled and ready to distribute for the weekly morning staff meeting; it’s only competitors are the coffee and doughnuts. Inside you know your hours of effort won’t be worth a zack if everyone is fighting off a snooze while you’re making your broadcast. If only your presentation looked more like a chocolate glazed doughnut you might feel more confident about it getting the attention it needs.
The good news is that with the use of infographics, your next meeting presentation can garner the attention it deserves with the use of visual knowledge that is both appealing and motivating. Let’s think about visuals for a moment. Recall your favourite book as a child. Now try to imagine it without the illustrations. A solid lesson can come from remembering that in large part what holds the attention of a busy little audience are the colourful illustrations, some capable of telling a story with only minimalistic writing. Your audience may not be little, but they are busy. The power of your information and presentations will grow by leaps and bounds if you give your audience stimulating visuals to learn from and act upon.
Everyone wins with the use of infographics. While infographics aren’t new, the fresh awareness of their impact would misleadingly make it seem so. We are now living in the age of infographics. Just take a look around and you’ll find them everywhere. Businesses use them to illustrate marketing and sales statistics, employee and research statistics-they even use them to illustrate processes and instructions. Bright colours, arrows, smooth flowing lines; they all do their part in delivering information that makes a reader feel as if they are embarking on a journey where there is no chance of losing their way.
Infographics are especially pragmatic for those using the internet as a business tool. If you haven’t added infographics to your business tool arsenal, there’s no time like now. Infographics are an effectual means for driving traffic to business websites. Websites user business to our doorstep by making us visible and easily accessible. It is easy to conceive why packaging information into an attractive graphic format will attract the attention of readers who will then follow the links that land them at your business gateway.
While an infographic is by no means a guarantee that you will drive customers to your site, they are proven to be more effective than plain text in doing so. The key to effective infographics is to be sure that the information that you are presenting is valuable to your audience. It must be informative, interesting, funny…whatever is appropriate for your topic, make it good. The more eye-catching your infographic is, the more compelled your potential audience will be to click on it, linking them to your website. Simply put, infographics benefit SEO by attracting people to click on your link, to share with friends, family and colleagues via social networking sites, thus driving up the traffic and visibility of your website and drawing the attention of search engines.
One critical thing to note is that search engines do not recognise the content of your infographic. This is the reason for the consistent stress placed upon making your infographic irresistible to the viewer. The ultimate goal is to use the infographic to entice viewers to click, which directs them to your website or compels them to share your infographic, again, generating traffic that search engines recognise and value. Oh, and did we mention the importance of making your infographic interesting, informative and, well-downright seductive?
If you don’t have an infographic specialist, or even someone who is great at graphic design work, boy have we got exciting news for you. There are two amazing places to turn for the solution to this dilemma. One is Visual.ly. (http://visual.ly/) Here you can find already made infographics with embed codes that can be placed and used to drive traffic to your site. It’s free to sign up. On this site you will find a community of users who have posted embeddable infographics, or you can also pay to have your own custom infographic created by a team of experienced designers.
Another favourite site for infographics is http://piktochart.com/. The folks at Piktochart make it easy to create infographics by dumping your own data into already created designs, using a very user-friendly program. While this site does have a fee associated with using it, you’ll likely find that once you get the hang of creating infographics and using them to optimise your web presence, you’ll be using the service enough to justify their small fee.
So there you have it, the answer for how to make your information as appetising as a delicious glazed doughnut. You have some new knowledge about how all of these critical web rules and tools interact together and now it’s time to unleash it and see what amazing results come running back to you. Here is an example infographic for photography lovers.
