Got a Little Knowledge to Share? Prove It with Your Own Infographic..

Having identified a potential source for clientele, I decided that I would make an infographic out of some marketing data I used in my business plan. An infographic plays an important part of your online marketing because it can crystallize ideas around a complicated topic; provides content that your clients may find useful; helps bring together colours schemes and text that can compliment other media; and it will increase your social capital.

Getting permission to use the data was pretty straight forward. I called the supervising officer of a study and explained my intended use and asked permission to use it. As expected, I needed to pass my versions in front of them before publishing. You might be surprised how simple it is to get permission to use copyright material. One should never use copyright material without it.

Providing your own data can be time consuming, but that method comes with it's own set of benefits, which I will go into in a future post.

I had budgeted 20 hours for the creation of the graphic and came in just under that. When setting up for its creation I went through the data and hand sketched the pictures I envisioned that would best represent the various graphs and charts I wanted to include. Where no "royalty free" images existed, I drew my own using a combination of Microsoft Word, Paint PhotoEditor (love it) and Adobe Photoshop. I put the whole thing together in Photoshop and passed it by an editor to make sure I didn't include any bone-headed errors.

Infographics are a great addition to an online marketing mix. You can see great examples online, some of which are very clever. If you like you can hire out the creation of your infographic to an outside agency by just supplying them with your data. For fun you can go to www.create.ly and there you can create infographics from your facebook account data and other sites as well. They even have a desktop diagramming program that you might want to look into.