My newest—and best—infographic (You can do this too)

I’m still playing around with free infographics tools and apps in preparation for my webinar tomorrow—Thursday, May 24—on How to Easily Create Free and Inexpensive Infographics.

You’d be amazed at the astonishing number of web-based tools, and reviewers, who refer to so many of these DIY graphics sites as “drop dead simple.” Not for my non-techie mind.

I abandoned Infogr.am, a site that a few reviewers were gushing over, when I tried repeatedly to load their template for a pie chart, but it kept loading something completely different.

OK, then. I chose another template and created a chart comparing the weight loss of three fictional women over a five-month period. When I got to the end of the project, about 45 minutes later, I lost all my work. Enough of that!

After doing a Google search for free infographics, I ended up at Piktochart.com and fell in love with this site! Everything is drag and drop. It’s easy to understand. The “undo” button, my best friend, is easy to locate. The only quibble I had was that I was unable to upload my logo or graphics. (Did I miss this somewhere?)

The infographic below took about two hours because I was super-picky about the fonts and colors. I chose one of their free templates rather than paying a monthly fee which would have given me a bigger selection of some gorgeous templates. I didn’t have time to research statistics to use when creating it, so I used information about my own business.

Also check out the other infographic I created earlier this week about 3 Questions Bloggers & Journalists Love using Easel.ly. If you want more time-saving tips about what to do, and not do, when you use these sites, register for Thursday’s infographics webinar here. I’m going to save you hours of time using these sites because I’ll tell you about all the mistakes I made. 
 

Even non-geeks can create infographics—here’s mine

Now I know why PR firms and graphics artists charge a fortune for those big, detailed infographics you see everywhere, like these on Pinterest.

They’re very difficult to plan, draw and execute.

The one below took me about an hour and a half to create on Easel.ly, a free tool that’s still in beta. It’s a bit buggy but has responsive email support which really impresses me.

I’ll be explaining how I did it and I’ll show you the guts of the site when I host the webinar How to Easily Create Free and Inexpensive Infographics at 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, May 24. If the time is inconvenient, register anyway because I’ll record it and send the video and audio replay links and the PowerPoint slides to everyone who signs up.

I’ll be covering things like bar charts, pie charts, doodles, Wordles, maps and flow charts. I’ll show you which free tools to use to illustrate quotes and turn them into colorful images to pin on Pinterest.

And I’ll give you lots of ideas on how you can use infographics to market whatever you’re selling, and things you should do BEFORE you start experimenting with these tools.

Here’s my first effort at doing something this detailed. I don’t have an artistic bone in my body. But I wouldn’t hesitate to offer this to, say, a blogger, along with a guest post on the same topic. What do you think? Comments?

 

 

Bloggers: Don’t make visitors log in before commenting

Don’t you  hate it when you visit a blog, read a post, love the topic, and even before you get to the end, you know what comment you’re going to add?

Then you reach the bottom of the post and you see this:
   
Log in box at Fast Company blog

   
That’s what happened to me just now when I read the article 10 Ways to Amplify a B2B PR Campaign by Wendy Marx at Fast Company’s blog. I love her list! She invited comments. And I had four more ideas I wanted to add.

Sorry, but I’m not hanging around to log in because I can’t remember if I have a Fast Company account. I’d have to dig around for my login name and password. If I don’t have one, I’d have to register. And that’s way too much trouble.

So instead, I’m criticizing the magazine and its dumb policy here.

Media outlets, by the way, seem to be the worst offenders. Many newspapers, which are dying, force the few visitors they have left to create an account before commenting at their blogs or websites. I’m a former newspaper editor. Before I left the business 17 years ago, I was appalled by the “screw you” attitude and awful customer service that permeates the industry.

 

My Ideas for Publicizing Your Publicity

Here’s what I would have written at the Fast Company blog. These ideas work for any PR campaign, not just B2B:

  1. When you’ve gotten national publicity, let your local newspaper, weekly newspaper or business journal know by submitting a press release. Go one step further. Pitch yourself and offer to explain how you got national publicity. 
       
  2. Ditto for your college alumni publication.
       
  3. Speakers, photocopy the article, with permission, and add it to your handouts.
       
  4. Write a letter to the editor of the newspaper or magazine that just wrote about you. Discuss one or two points the reporter didn’t include, or elaborate on a specific issue within the overall story. You get in front of the same audience twice!  If readers missed reading the original article, they’ll see your name and company name in the letter.

Those are my ideas. Add yours to the list. Or explain why you think media outlets and others have idiotic policies that make readers log in.

 


A Tool That Can Help You

My Special Report #13: How to Recycle Your Publicity, has many more ideas on this topic. It was updated a few months ago. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rebroadcast your webinars with live Q&A, sell more

oops signIf you’re a subject matter expert who hosts live webinars, like I do, you know all the problems with webinar technology.

  • You accidentally click the wrong button on the console and discover that for the last 10 minutes, your audience has been unable to hear you.
       
  • Or you struggle to present in-depth content while keeping one eye on the box where questions from the audience appear.
       
  • Or you hear bad feedback in your headset and don’t know how to make it go away.
       
  • Or—and this is the worst one—a thunderstorm storm rolls through your area and knocks out electricity halfway through the call.
       
  • The ongoing problem I face is taking the time to promote all the recorded webinars I sell as products. I’m usually so busy creating and promoting the next one, that the ones I recorded even a few months ago don’t sell as well as I’d hoped.
     

I’ve Found the Solution 

Tom Antion’s free webinar on “Hybrid Webinars: How to Make a Fortune with Live Broadcasts” is the answer to my prayers. I’ve seen Tom hosting these for months, and I’ve pestered him endlessly until he finally offered a webinar explaining how he does it. Watch the free replay here. (Affiliate link) 

He coined the phrase “Hybrid Webinars” because they’re a combination of a recording, with a live Q&A. Here’s how it works.

You choose a topic your audience will love and offer a free or paid call. Tom offers almost all of his for free and often gets several hundred people to register.

He presents content, takes questions and records the call. At the end, he makes an offer for a product or service.

Several weeks later, he offers a rebroadcast, often on a Saturday morning when his schedule is more open and when people have more time to watch and listen.  But he’s available during the rebroadcast to answer questions live.

During last week’s call, which was entirely live, he explained how profitable these webinars have been. I captured this screenshot::
 

hybrid webinar

 

Note that the $58,866.85 figure is only part of the money he made during this first webinar. The video includes other slides that show additional revenue earned by doing other smart things during the webinar. It helps that Tom markets these webinars to an email list of more than 60,000 people. But even if your list is far smaller, you can see that you, too, can easily start bringing in more revenue from these calls than if you were to simply record the webinar and sell the replay with no live Q&A.  

Jeff Herring, one of Tom’s students, hosts these Hybrid Webinars, too, and actually answered questions during one replay while he was away from home at a speaking engagement! In fact, you can even answer questions while you’re on the beach, using your mobile phone.    

Tom explained ethical considerations, shortcuts, marketing tips, and techie tips. He showed us how he uses a dirt-cheap program (I use it too) that lets you create macro keys with answers to frequently asked questions. So with just a few keystrokes, you can give a lengthy answer to a question without having to retype the answer every time.  

 

I’m On Board, How About You?

I hope to start recording free or paid webinars soon using Tom’s system. I’ll check back with you to let you know how it’s working for me. 

After you watch his webinar replay, weigh in here with your comments on whether you think this would work for your business model.

Learn how to make simple infographics for PR or for fun

I’ve been researching a variety of free and inexpensive programs and apps that allow you make infographics you can use in a PR campaign, at your website, in marketing materials, to share on the social media sites, or just for fun.

You can learn them during the webinar on How to Easily Create Free or Inexpensive Infographics from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, May 24.  

If you’re on Pintereset, you’re probably noticing all the really cool infographics, from the big, fancy ones that cost several thousand dollars to the sticky notes that include pithy sayings and quotes. 

I used Pinwords to quickly create this image of two of my favorite dog sayings:

   

I used Wordle.net to create this word cloud, based on words that appear at this blog:

 

You can use wordles in your marketing materials, at your blog, as part of a contest, or in many other ways that I’ll explain on Thursday.

A  few weeks ago, I showed you a cool graphic I created in less than 15 minutes at Visual.ly that compared my Twitter profile with Oprah’s. 

These are three of the easiest ones I’ve created. I’ll show you more, including bar charts, pie charts, flow charts and others during Thursday’s webinar. If the time is inconvenient for you, register anyway because I’m recording it, and you can access the replay, the MP3 and the PowerPoint slides I used. 

Have you created your own infographics? If so, email me with the links and explain what tool you used. I might include them in my webinar. Or, comment here and let me know if you’ve heard about any infographics programs that others have recommended to you.