Free Infographic Resources For Your Business
By Rebekah Henson October 8, 2013
People respond to stories – stories about you, stories about them, stories about the world around them.
Data can tell a compact and highly shareable story if it’s presented the right way. Infographics offer a clean, readable and fun venue for showcasing your visual story – plus, they’re pretty popular right now.
But not every business has the resources to create a good infographic. You might have all the parts you need for a good story but lack the design.
Luckily, a number of free tools can help you.
For Sharing Data
Infographics can share a story with your own data or with someone else’s data. You might have the perfect story idea, but no time to compile the research yourself.
These are two of our favorite tools for creating visuals from other people’s data:
Google Databoard
Released by Google in early July, Databoard lets you explore Google’s own research topics and share charts with your followers.
You can also compile relevant charts into your own infographic and share it or use it for your own internal needs.
Visual.ly
Visual.ly is part infographic library, part infographic creator. Browse through a ton of already-made infographics to share with your audience, or create your own visualization.
Their Create tool pulls together data from your social networks. You can track the health of your business’s Facebook page with easy-to-read graphs, or show off your impact to your followers.
These social infographics could be a fun addition to your end-of-the-year round-up showing what an awesome year your business has had.
For Creating Your Own Story
Other people’s data can only get you so far. When it’s time to tell your own story, these are our favorite tools for doing it quickly and aesthetically – and for free.
Easel.ly
Do you have a great visual story to tell, but not much data? Then Easel.ly is your graphic builder.
They’ve got 14 templates to choose from, but their editor includes so many icons, graphs and text styles that you can easily create something unique and appealing.
Easel.ly is ideal for creating flowcharts, maps and visual comparisons.
Infogr.am
Do you have tons of awesome data from a study you ran? Then Infogr.am is the tool for you.
Infogr.am lets you import your data into its editor for easy creation, with tons of styled graphs and charts you can add to their pre-designed templates.
Which One’s Your Favorite?
Out of these four, which your favorite tool for presenting and sharing your visual stories? Or is there another resource you’ve found and love more? Let us know in the comments!
theHman
10/8/2013 3:01 pmI know that posts like these hardly ever get commented on, but I for one really enjoyed it.
It’s short, sweet, to the point and gives me a number of useful resources I can use in my business to increase sales.
EXACTLY what I’m looking for!
Thanks for sharing Rebekah
Darryl H.
10/8/2013 3:03 pmThese are some awesome resources Rebekah, thanks for sharing!
renee baude
10/8/2013 3:11 pmI have tried all of these and found easel.ly to be the easiest for me. The learning curve was small and I had a great looking info graphic in an afternoon!
Be Blessed.
Carol Manser
10/8/2013 6:35 pmHi Rebekah, I had no idea! I’d never heard of any of these tools, and now I feel inspired to become a great graphic designer! …Or at least create one infographic and then brag about it.
Start small, think BIG! Yes, that should work.
Ming Jong Tey
10/8/2013 9:50 pmHi Rebekah,
Great to see my picture showing up in your post (didn’t know I was the most influential user on that day, lol…)
Thanks for sharing all those great resources for creating infographic! It is a great way to increase the exposure with infograhic (plus a big chance for it to go viral)
Cheers,
MingJong
Paul Giorkas
10/9/2013 1:22 amGreat ! It’s the first time I hear about Google Databoard. I’ll go check it right now ! 😉
alex
10/9/2013 1:51 amthis free info graphic resources can assist to uplift the standard of business.i wellcome this hoping it will assist me.
Gail J Richardson
10/9/2013 7:25 amHi,
I want to thank you for providing us with so much useful tips I have never used any of those sites before but I will now.
Thanks for pointing all these great resources
Warmly
Gail J Richardson
James Early
10/10/2013 3:17 pmWow, thanks. This is very helpful. I had not heard of easel.ly before. I have always wondered how people made those great graphics. Now I know.
Randall Magwood
10/10/2013 9:53 pmI was thinking about pie graphs and bar graphs today lol. But these kind of infographic depictions are helpful when gathering data about a niche or competitor(s).
Mohini Puranik
10/11/2013 7:01 amNamaste Rebekah,
Thank you for this informative info for creating infographics. It’s very useful and precise. I was searching for this information. Databoard looks nice.
john
10/11/2013 4:14 pmThx for the support
Dave Koba
10/13/2013 6:37 amHi Rebekah,
Thanks for posting this information. These sites are great starting points for learning about and creating infographics.
I’d like to offer that before jumping headlong into building your graphic, as with any worthwhile undertaking, you need to approach this with the regular basics of any project:
1. A clear idea of what your after (the goal)
2. How you want it to look what does it signify (design/theme)
3. Resources (do I have everything I need to do this? (time, experience, personnel, data, additional images, etc.)
A major starting point is to decide on your theme, or the driving point behind your graphic. Of the articles I’ve found on the web written about type/theme, the following list seems to be the most conclusive and accurate:
1. How-to (step by step processes)
2. Research Results (of a study or survey)
3. Compare & Contrast (growth, change, or differences of products, ideas, etc)
4. Did you Know? (interesting facts)
5. Demographics (business market research)
6. Advocacy (describing issue, educating, calling to action)
7. Timeline (history of how someone or something came to be widely recognized -brand, issue,etc)
8. Tips or Demos (best practices)what the theme will be, how it should be laid out and plenty of data to back your story accurately.
After that, your design should include proper branding, flow and complete, accurate data. (Content is still the King, after all.)
With all that at the ready, any of these sites are great resources to build a graphic. Of them, I found easel.ly to be ‘easily’ the most comprehensive and straight-forward to use.
Thanks
Dave
Derrick Davis
10/13/2013 9:35 amVery good info here.As we search for more creative ways to get our audience and clients to interact on our blog,we have found that infographics gain much more attention than an article with graphics.
We will start to use infographics more in our blog posts.
We also invite guest writers to contribute to our blog and in return they receive great backlinks for the great content.
Steve Shaw
10/16/2013 5:12 amHi Rebekah
These are great resources, thank you for sharing – didn’t know Google’s databoard existed, and visual.ly looks perfect for creating some great infographics to start sharing.
Juliana
10/18/2013 12:37 amThank you for the wonderful videos. I enjoy learning from AWeber very much. Their lessons are always short, clear and easy to follow.
Abdullah
10/27/2013 1:35 pmThanks for share this I want it and today I talk about this to my team
Jackie
10/30/2013 1:42 amWe use these infographic for our business. Found very easy and simple to design. Thanks for sharing.
Alex Cardo
11/6/2013 8:14 amI’ve always thinking that infographics are paid services. Thanks for sharing FREE ones. I’ll try to make my first infographic in travel niche.
Are there anyone who have a success story for its site or blog, when used infographics. May be for someone it becomes a viral content and gives huge traffic from reddit or stumbleupon?
Sam Fisher
12/10/2013 11:08 amVery nicely articulated! Yeah Info graphics are the great way to present the complex information quickly and clearly, Thanks for sharing the above resources