A Guestographic Guide for Link Builders and Marketers

Marketing is a lot like sailing — a huge part of it involves constantly fixing and optimizing, even when nothing’s actually broken. That’s because the pros don’t wait until they’re aimlessly drifting through the open waters to solve problems; they tweak early and often.

The same goes for your backlink strategy. Even if it’s humming along, the environment around it is constantly moving. If you’re more of a check-now-than-deal-with-blinking-engine-lights-later kind of marketer, you’ll be interested, and maybe even relieved, to know about guestographics.

These little gems are a lean, efficient way to earn quality backlinks without committing to full guest posts. In this guide, we’ll walk through what they are, why they work and how to start using them before the tide changes.

What Is a Guestographic? 

Guestographics are the brainchild of two tried-and-true link-building strategies: guest posting and infographics. From guest posting, it borrows the strategic outreach to a third-party site to build authority, reach new audiences and generate a flow of traffic back to your website. Unlike traditional guest blogging strategies, which involve writing complete articles for the host, guestographics borrows the visual presentation from infographics. 

Essentially, you’re creating a custom graphic for authoritative websites, then offering it to them with a link back to relevant content on your website. Marketers have been doing it for decades, using a whole blog post with an appropriate link. That small thread of hyperlinked text serves as a vote of confidence to search engines, boosting domain authority and search visibility. 

However, in the days of snackable assets and bite-sized attention spans, visual content is a much more effective way to deliver a relatively large amount of information to a reader in a comparatively small timeframe. Whether you go the traditional route or lean into the guestographics, guest posting does wonders for your SEO strategy, as it signals authority and credibility, while driving new traffic. 

Why Create a Guestographic?

If you’re in the market for new streams of digital traffic or you’re digging into your SEO strategy to climb the ranks in the SERPS, backlinks should be part of your mix. Here are just some of the reasons for incorporating the guestographic into your content marketing strategy: 

• They’re cost-effective and straightforward: If you’re already creating visual content as part of your marketing strategy, guestographics are an easy swerve. If you’re not, there are plenty of inexpensive AI tools that can help.
• They’re excellent for visual communications: Humans can process images far quicker than we process text, making it more alluring to the target audience — plus, adding highly shareable visuals is a great way to promote a blog post. 
• They differentiate your offering: The market for backlinks is inundated with requests. Relevant content with visual appeal can make your outreach stand out. 
• You have more control: Blog-style guest posting sometimes hands control over to the host to edit for the tone and adjust link placement. With a guestographic, you maintain control over the narrative, link placement and supporting content.
• Infographics get shared: Guestographics give you a visual asset to work with, which naturally fits into more channels. Unlike long-form guest posts, which are somewhat trapped on the host site, a strong infographic circulates through social media, curated content lists and anywhere else people share high-quality content. Basically, your outreach gets more mileage. 
• It’s a scalable strategy: Once you’ve got your workflow tight, you can spin up multiple guestographics without reinventing the wheel. And each one becomes a new opportunity for link acquisition, brand visibility and genuine value-add for your partners.

What Makes a Guestographic Good (and When To Use Them)

A good guestographic has one job: Make complex information easier to understand and more shareable. If it can do both at once, you’ve got an asset that pulls in backlinks far more easily than the classic request routine. Below are a few characteristics that make a strong guestographic stand out. 

Beautiful, Logical Design and Layout

The design is your delivery system: It should make information effortless to follow. To achieve that, you need to build a clean visual path that guides the reader’s eyes naturally from the headline to the data points to the takeaway. Visual hierarchy, logical structure and aesthetic design keep your content feeling intuitive and easy to absorb.

High-Quality Information (and a Little Extra Value)

A guestographic only works if the information itself is valuable. Keep explanations clear, use current data and tailor your message to the audience. If you want to take it one step further, include an updated statistic or break down the information in a more digestible way than the original article did. Hosts love it when you make their content better for their readers.

Relevance to the Host’s Audience

Important distinction: A guestographic links back to your site, but it’s created for the audience of the site you’re pitching. The content should directly support their interests, questions or pain points. Explore the types of content that perform well on the host site or find any gaps in coverage you can meaningfully fill.

Using the Right Format

Different information calls for different visual structures. Choose your format according to what the information is already trying to achieve. Some of your options include: 

• Lists: Use these for depicting step-by-step tasks or items to be checked. 
• Statistics graphics: Showcase key information with visual statistics when the data is the star of the show.
• Process visuals: Break down complex, multi-step workflows or funnel-style explanations.
• How-tos: Lead audiences through a process with actionable, visual guidance.
• Geographic visuals: Demonstrate location-based insights, maps or regional comparisons with a geographic layout.
• Hierarchies or frameworks: Rank or categorize different data points, or show relationships between concepts.

When To Use Guestographics

Integrating guestographics into your digital marketing strategy can pull you out of plenty of backlink chokeholds — but you won’t need them for everything. Here are some good situations to start thinking seriously about them: 

1. Your backlink strategy needs a revival: If you’ve been producing good content but your domain authority isn’t improving, a few extra authoritative backlinks can help.
2. You’re refreshing or repurposing existing content: Older articles with strong foundations are ripe for the picking. Pull out one key section, like a process or a list, and turn it into a visual that’s easy for other sites to promote.
3. You need fast audience expansion: Because guestographics are easily shareable, they can show up basically anywhere on the internet. Their visual nature can expose you to a whole new world of additional organic backlinks and traffic.
4. The topic is easier to understand visually: Some explanations were born to become an awesome infographic. If your content includes steps, comparisons, frameworks or data, it’s likely a decent candidate. 
5. Your outreach is flopping: An engaging infographic adds a touch of va-va-voom to your outreach email, which can entice a more receptive response from the host. Instead of asking for space to publish your content, you’re offering a ready-made asset that improves their page with minimal effort on their part. 

Guestographics for Link Building 101

We couldn’t get through this article without getting into the execution. At a basic level, the visual itself should be the hardest worker, so integrate the graphic design process early on. When you can narrow it down to a few replicable and customizable layouts, your process suddenly becomes scalable. If your team is already at capacity, AI tools can help you build a professional infographic without derailing the rest of your workload.

Next, focus on keyword research for your link-building initiatives so you’re delivering the valuable information people are looking for. Including attribution positions your expertise front and center and also does wonders for your brand awareness as the asset makes the rounds. 

Once you’ve created it, shift gears into outreach and tracking. Send your guestographic to sites where the audience aligns with your topic, then monitor where it gets placed and how those placements perform. Pay attention to clicks, time on page and shares, as they’ll tell you whether the piece is actually working or where to make tweaks. 

Optimize Your Link Building Strategy

At this point, you’ve probably already noticed the pattern: Content marketing moves fast, attention spans move faster and nobody has time for strategies that churn through resources with little ROI. Guestographics are a nifty loophole in the system. They’re lighter than full guest posts, easier to produce than you might think and, when they’re done well, far more effective at earning the kinds of links that genuinely shape SEO results.

If you want to give it a shot, start small, track your results, then adjust and scale your strategy. When your visuals are clear, your outreach is targeted and your links are working in the background, your SEO strategy can garner better results.