Facebook Archives - Cathy Stucker

Create an Infographic and Go Viral!

September 18, 2013 by Cathy Stucker

One of the most effective and entertaining ways to package a large volume of information is through an infographic. Most people would find an article full of statistics boring, but put them into an infographic and people eat them up!

Infographics get shared on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. On sites such as Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon, infographics get “upvoted” a lot and are very visible

So, how do you create a winning infographic that generates buzz and traffic?

Begin with a Great Topic
Start with a useful, interesting and unique idea. The concept should involve a topic that people want to know about. Surprising or controversial information will get attention, as will helpful information that teaches how to do something or helps the reader make a decision.

You don’t have to create an infographic about what you do, but you should make your infographic interesting to your target market. For example, if you sell office furniture don’t create an infographic about different types of office furniture. Instead, you could do an infographic on “The 12 Types of Office Jerks” or “9 Ways to Procrastinate without Getting Caught” to capture the attention of office workers.

Do Your Research
The goal of an infographic is to provide a lot of information in a concise format. Gather data from sources like Wikipedia, various government agencies including the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the IRS, books, newspaper articles, magazines and so on.

Do online searches and capture interesting facts, statistics and websites. Use Evernote or your favorite method to compile your research. You may or may not use all of the data in your infographic, but having a lot of information available will help in the final graphic creation process.

Organize Your Data and Tell a Story
Infographics are usually created in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, but you can use whatever graphics program you are most comfortable with.

Keep the design simple and clean. Too many effects and embellishments complicate the graphic. Make sure the important message of the infographic is obvious.

Lay out all the data you have in a logical fashion. Make it a story that is unfolding as the reader scrolls down your infographic.

If you aren’t a design wiz, there are DIY infographic templates you can use to create your graphic. Or you can hand off your data to an infographic designer to have them put it together for you. If you do not have a favorite designer, you can find one on sites such as elance or even fiverr.

Once you have a completed infographic, put it up on social bookmarking sites, on your own social media profiles and on your website. Be sure to include an embed code with your infographic to make it easy for people to publish your infographic on their own sites. And include share buttons for the major social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. If the graphic is shocking, funny and informative, you can bet it will spread.

Does Google Send You Too Much Traffic?

November 13, 2008 by Cathy Stucker

It seems that everyone wants to be #1 in Google, and get the traffic goodness that flows from that. Even if you are not at the top of the search engine rankings, you may find that you get a large percentage of your visitors from Google. That is not necessarily a good thing.

There is nothing wrong with getting a lot of visitors referred to your site by Google. However, if those visitors represent 30%, 40% or more of the traffic you receive, you need a new plan. If the Google algorithm changes, or Google penalizes your site for some reason, you will see a dramatic drop in visitors–and the income they produce.

Start by taking a look at your web site statistics. How do people come to your site? There are three general ways: search engines, links from other sites, and direct entry.

Chances are, most of your search engine traffic comes from Google. Obviously, you do not want to receive fewer referrals from them. Instead, you should diversify so that you receive more visitors from other sources. Let’s say you are getting 1000 visitors a day to your site, and Google sends 40% (400) of them. Other search engines account for 20% (200), links another 20% (200) and direct traffic (type-ins, bookmarks, clicks from email) the final 20% (200).

If you could generate an additional 300 visits a day on average from sources other than Google, you not only have a 30% increase in traffic, you have reduced Google’s percentage of traffic referrals from 40% to 30%, making you less dependent on the traffic from Google. Even if you see an increase in Google referrals and the percentage of traffic they refer to you stays at 40%, the overall increase in the number of visitors will help to insulate you from any changes affecting future Google referrals.

Does increasing your traffic this way sound impossible? It is not. Although it probably will not happen overnight, it can be done with a few simple steps. Here are some ways to do that:

Optimize areas of your site for other major search engines, such as Yahoo! and Windows Live. Although all search engines look for some of the same things when ranking sites, each has their own algorithms and weighting and generates different results. You can learn more about optimizing for all of the search engines at http://www.SEOSmarts.com/

Get lots of links. The search engines all like to see lots of quality links to your site, so getting more links will help your rankings. But the links also bring more people to your site, and that is the more important result in this context. Look for ways to get one-way links from authority sites and quality sites in your topic area.

Get active in social media. My logs show visitors coming to my site through Twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook and other social media sites where I have a presence.

Encourage people to bookmark your site. That can mean saving it to their Favorites, or on a social bookmarking site such as delicious.

Ask visitors to sign up for your RSS feed or email updates. If your site generates an RSS feed (as all blogs and many other sites do) use a service such as Feedburner to offer visitors ways to be notified when new articles appear on your site.

Start an email list. Use a service such as Aweber to collect email addresses and send a newsletter from time to time. Include links to recent articles and other resources on your site to encourage readers to click through. I find that sending a newsletter results in a traffic spike at my site every time.

Add new content frequently to encourage visitors to return often. Tools such as bookmarking, RSS and email newsletters are great at reminding visitors to return to your site, but you have to give them a reason to do so. When you update your site regularly, visitors will come back to see what is new.

Implementing some or all of the above ideas will get more visitors to your web site and make you less dependent on Google for traffic. Get started now and you can see results within days or weeks.

Watch for my upcoming series on specific way to get more incoming links and bring more people to your website or blog. Subscribe now, via RSS or email, so you don’t miss a thing!