An offshoot of the personal finance website Mint.com, which Intuit acquired in November 2009, the MintLife blog dispenses all kinds of helpful advice and insight on personal finance. It’s successfully built a large and very active online community (approximately 700,000 unique visitors a month) of personal finance devotees. The MintLife blog serves as a customer acquisition channel for Mint.com, which offers a variety of free personal finance services.

Like any company trying to attract and engage customers online, Mint.com faces the usual challenges: readers with short attention spans, competition that’s just a click away, and an increasingly fractured media landscape. But MintLife has another big challenge: presenting complex financial concepts and terms to non-finance types. The site has solved this challenge through the use of effective infographics.

Simplifying complex information

“Infographics allow us to present complex information and data in simplified, easy-to-approach visual formats,” says Lee Sherman, editor at Mint.com. “Given our subject matter and target audience, infographics are a very effective way to present complex information. They allow us to tell a story in an interesting and efficient manner.”

MintLife is not targeting your traditional personal finance audience, which is predominantly male and older. MintLife’s audience is 40 percent female and relatively younger (the median age is 30). Knowing that its audience won’t read in-depth explanations, and understanding full well how the Web has changed the way people consume information, MintLife made infographics a core piece of its content strategy.

Visit MintLife and you’ll quickly notice how central visual content and infographics are to its content strategy. Every feature story includes a prominent photo or visual element and infographics are used generously.

Going viral

In addition to making it easier to present complex financial information, Sherman also points to the viral nature of infographics as a powerful marketing and customer acquisition tool. “Our infographics are syndicated on a lot on other websites, so having our logo on the graphic, as well as built-in code that links readers back to our site, translates to a lot of Web traffic that would otherwise cost us money.”

A great example of an effective infographic is the one MintLife created in September 2009 to educate readers on the realigned U.S. automotive industry. The Big Three automakers—GM, Ford and Chrysler—were in the spotlight throughout the recession of 2009, having received hundreds of millions of dollars in bailout money and undergone a major shake-out. With so much change to the industry—brands shuttered, acquisitions by foreign automakers, and new upstarts—it was hard to figure out what the reformed industry looked like. And few easy-to-understand explanations were available.

The “New Auto Industry Breakdown” infographic provides a succinct visual synopsis of the U.S. auto industry. It shows how each automaker was impacted by the shake up, their new ownership, and the job toll. It also offers a brief forecast for each automaker’s future prospects.

The auto industry infographic generated 51,000 page views on MintLife alone and received 642 “diggs” on Digg.com. (The highest number of page views MintLife has generated with a single infographic is 120,000.)

“MintLife’s page-view numbers would not be possible without infographics,” says Sherman.

Given its specialization in financial and quantitative analysis, Mint.com practices what it preaches when it comes to its own investing. According to Sherman, the strong conversion of blog visitors to paying customers has more than justified Mint.com’s investment in MintLife.

Well, sure enough, the venerable New York Times eventually switched to color photography. And  if you’ve read the Wall Street Journal lately, you know it’s hardly the text-centric newspaper it once was.

One thing USA Today realized, even before the rise of the Internet, is that we humans have become increasingly visual creatures. Nowadays, with screens and information pervading every nook and cranny we inhabit, figuring out how to organize and present that information is more important than ever.

As a result, those big infographics have become increasingly popular.  In Information Design Workbook, author Kim Baer nicely summarizes the reasons why. “With all this information flying at us, we’re craving some guidance to help us sort through it. Hence the preponderance of blogs, news aggregators, content-specific RSS feeds, and an even greater need for information graphics and charts to help visually distill information. Editorial direction and thoughtful design can help us sort through and decide what’s most meaningful for us.”

In helping clients develop more effective communications, we’re leaning on infographics more and more. They’re particularly useful on the Web, when you have a limited chance to engage your reader. And visuals can go a long way if you need to communicate complex information, or a lot of it. Apparently USA Today knew something the rest of the newspaper industry didn’t.

I’m working on a mini case study about an infographic Tendo helped produce with a partner, so look for that follow-up post soon. In the meantime, I’ve listed some good resources below if you want to learn more about information graphics, or if you’re looking for inspiration.

Cool Infographics

40 Useful and Creative Infographics

Edward Tufte

FlowingData

Flickr

Information Design Workbook