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

Originally published at TopRank Online Marketing Blog