How To Make Infographics the Free & Easy Way

We are all acustomed to see infographics everywhere these days. Some people see them as a way to “dumb down” traditional text articles. Hmmm, I guess we are all bombarded with stuff and a jazzy graphic sometimes makes digesting information (especially statistics) just quicker and less boring.

The other cool thing about infographics is that they get shared around a lot, far more than articles or even videos. They are quick & easy to post on Facebook walls & Pinterest boards and, because they are fun and easy, they get a lot of likes & shares.

Now this means a couple of things. Traffic and backlinks.

Publish your infographic on your blog and link it on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter etc and, if it is shared around, you get a bunch of free traffic and some extra social backlinks happening.

Now, all is well & good but making them needs time, skill or outsourcing cash or an expensive tool.

Or does it?

There are a couple of sites I have found where you can create your own simple infographics free of charge using a very simple “drag & drop” system.

The first one is quite well known. Infogr.am has a free service which is a little bit limited (but still workable) and a paid service which is $12 a month.

The freebie limitations are that you have fewer templates to work with, you can’t direct link to your infographic or download it. You can share it from infogr.am or – better still – embed it on your site (just like embedding a video).

Having said that, it is easy to use and you can put something attractive together very quickly. It is actually good fun & quite addictive.

Now, the second one I found is still in beta. As far as I can see it is 100% free right now. Also it has a lot more functionality. You can find it here: easel.ly

At Easel.ly they provide you with sharing options, an embed code and a direct link to your infographic on their S3 account. Best of all, you can download it (wa-hey!).

So, there you are. Two totally fun and free places where you can get creative and make some cool infographics.