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Jul 27, 2012

Infographics – the power of pictures for your blog

Infographics – a social sharing success story

Infographics - The power of pictures for your blogHaving had a bit of education recently on using Facebook. Pinterest and other social media spaces where pictures are so popular, I’ve been sitting thinking how I could leverage the power of pictures. Which is how I got into infographics and started sharing them with you.

“Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly.”

Doug Newsom and Jim Haynes (2004). ‘Public Relations Writing: Form and Style’.

So infographics have been around for a while but it seems only recently that they have started to become mainstream. Probably because a well prepared and executed one with descriptive text and colourful graphics create high impact for social sharing.

Then synchronicity reared its beautiful head and AppSumo delivered an infographics package called Piktochart for a really good deal. So I produced my own for Work from Home Wisdom on setting up a home office. Sharing this on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest has proved to me that pictures get noticed far more than clever writing.

Then I started to become aware of all these, sometimes very cheesy, quote pictures and I thought, how can I do that? Easy. Fire up your Keynote or Powerpoint, grab your favourite quote, make sure you attribute it correctly, find a drop dead gorgeous theme, and whizzo, you got yourself a possibly viral piece of work that people can easily share.

So why not have a go and share them with me on Pinterest or Facebook? I’d love to see what you come up with. :-)

Remember though that leveraging the power of pictures and infographics is only a part of the strategy for getting noticed on the web. Your search engine optimisation also includes other factors and quality focused content is still a major piece of the puzzle.

By Andy Britnell Blog Optimisation 16 Comments Tags: , , , , , , ,

May 26, 2011

Social media traffic

Google search ranking and social media profilesIf you look closely at your your website or blog traffic figures you will notice that social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, deliver much more loyal, targeted and engaged visitors. That is they spend more time on your site, search deeper and are more likely to comment on your blog or buy from you. I call them ‘sticky’ visitors as they don’t bounce away from your website easily.

For my site and other sites I look after they make up to 25 – 30% of all monthly traffic.

The other aspect is that if you have a presence on social media sites you get an extra tick in the box from the search engines. The search robots recognise that your blog or website is associated with a high ranking site and you get kudos because of that.

Although you may feel that writing yet another online profile is tedious, they do help you to dominate the first few pages of Google when someone searches for your name. There are four other ‘Andy Britnells’ who have a good presence on the web. My website, blog, Twitter and Google account profiles are on the first two pages and I have the majority of entries on the first 6 pages. (Click on the image above and then click again to see first page on Google in more detail)

I will need to work on my Facebook and LinkedIn profile if I want a clean sheet. Not that simple when you have a racing driver and two managing directors of largish companies competing for the space.

How do you rank for your name on Google and what do you do to keep your profile high on the search engines?

By Andy Britnell Social Media 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,