How to Use Slideshare to Market your Business

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Are you looking for more forms of content for your business? Do you want to increase your brand exposure online?

Let’s talk Slideshares.

This article will introduce you to the world of Slideshare presentations. I’ll tell you exactly what a Slideshare is, why you need to use them, and how to optimize your Slideshares for greatest effect.

I’ll also be including three top tips to get the most out of Slideshares. So pay attention.

Tweetable Takeaways:

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1. What is a Slideshare?


Slideshare is a free social website which allows you to post content (PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, videos, documents, and others) as a presentation.

Your presentations are public, and can be searched, viewed and even shared by anyone. They can increase brand awareness, expand your market reach, and ultimately drive traffic to your blog or website.

Why Slideshare?

  • It’s the most popular document and presentation-sharing website in the world: It has a global Alexa ranking of 122, 130 million page views and 60 million monthly visitors

  • It’s mobile compatible: SlideShare automatically optimizes your content for mobile users

  • The homepage features popular content: If your presentation, document or video is successful enough to reach the front page, it will go viral, hugely increasing your online brand profile over night

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Embedding your Slideshare:

One of the greatest uses of the Slideshare presentation is the ability to embed them within your content. Not only does this hugely increase the Slideshare presentation’s SEO (see below), it also increases the value of your content. A blog post with a Slideshare, summarizing the whole post, is far more valuable than one without.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)


One of the chief goals of the modern digital marketer is to increase your brand’s SEO ranking. Optimizing your content for SEO increases the chance of your brand’s website and content popping up when somebody searches for a specific idea or term.

Think of SEO as your brand’s ‘cool-factor’. Increasing your SEO is like having the cool pair of shoes in middle-school: everybody will notice you, talk about you, and make you the center of attention.

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There are many strategies to improve your business’ SEO. Creating original content (like a blog, ebook or infographic) is one of the main ways. Google rewards frequent and popular postings, as well as frequently-linked websites (like Youtube and, awesomely, Slideshare)

Google ranks successful Slideshare presentations above blog articles, news stories, even (occasionally) Youtube videos.

What this means for you:

Creating Slideshares is a great way to increase your business’ online profile. You’ll be more frequently found in Google search, increase traffic to your website, and increase your reputation as a source of information.


Top Tip #1: Create a Slideshare template and copy your content into it each time. Keep your slide format the same throughout the presentation. This makes your Slideshare recognizable and easy to understand.


3. Optimizing your Slideshare Presentation


In order to get the most out of your Slideshare, you need to be making it as appealing as possible as well as optimizing it for search.

Image:

Choose an eye-catching, colorful image for your presentation’s first page. When choosing an image, think about your audience. Will they respond to:

  • Images of people?

  • Cartoons?

  • Text?

  • Your brand logo?

Title:

Your presentation’s title is what makes it searchable. If you’re summarizing a blog post, I recommend my article “ 10 Sure-Fire Blog Title Formulas that Attract Readers

Otherwise, just remember that your title needs to be optimized for search. Include words relevant to the subject matter, numbers, and words and phrases like ‘How-to’, ‘10-Step’, and ‘Top Tips’.

Remember to make your title (and image) large enough and simple enough to be understandable when in the thumbnail format.

Tags:

Slideshare allows you to include up to 20 tags, making your presentation or document easily-searchable. Your tags will, of course, depend on your subject-matter. Wishpond’stags often include #SMM, #Facebook Marketing, #Marketing for Small Business, #Facebook Contests, and others.

Check out more hashtag strategies to get your Slideshare seen and shared.

Description:

Including a great description for your Slideshare will not only make it more appealing to your reader, but also increase its SEO. Include relevant, highly searchable terms within your description and watch your Views go up.

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Links:

Links are what makes or breaks your SEO. This is because Google PageRank is designed on the assumption that those pages with the most links to them should be higher up search results than those without links.

Place links throughout your Slideshare presentation, as well as the last slide. Wishpond’sbloggers always include a ‘Further Reading’ slide with four or five links to related articles, and the slide below as the last.

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4. Slideshares from your Blog


The most practical and straightforward use of Slideshare presentations is as a synopsis of your blog posts. Slideshare presentations are easily consumable, easily understandable, and quick to digest.

You take the main points of your blog article and summarize them in a format designed for people at work, on the go, and with not enough hours in the day (so… everybody).

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What to remember:

  • You’ve already written the blog article, so creating a slideshare from that content is simple and at least doubles your exposure

  • Sometimes your Slideshare will be more successful than your original article (see ‘Going Viral’ below)

  • Consider writing your blog articles with a Slideshare in mind: Include three or four strategies at the bottom of each section, easily transferrable to Presentation format

  • Keep your Slideshares simple: a picture and a few bullet-points per slide


Top Tip #2: _ _Include a Call-to-Action at the end of your presentation, driving traffic to your blog, landing page, or website. Also include a branded logo within each slide.


5. Catering to your Audience


Your online audience is pressed for time. This is why we write blog articles and content with bullet-points, sections and bold the important text. This is why our titles have to be eye-grabbing and descriptive; why our first line has to grip our readers.

The same ideas need to be applied with Slideshares. Keep it simple, short and sweet.

Create your slideshare for your audience. Remember (because they’ve chosen the shorter, presentation-format format of your content) that they are pressed for time. Communicate everything you need to as efficiently as possible:

  • Keep your text minimal.

  • Let the slide’s image speak for you

  • Include a table of contents as your second or third slide for easy consumption

  • Remember the presentation’s context helps make individual slides understandable

The slide below, from my most recent blog post The Science of Turning Instagram Followers into Customers, includes three simple takeaways from the article.

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One of the goals of Slideshare is to create something that the viewer can return to over and over again for reference. My post includes 6 slides almost exactly like the above, totalling 20 top tips and four awesome related articles.

6. Going Viral


The goal of every content marketer, going viral can be one of the most nonsensical things in online marketing. There’s no hard and fast rule to going viral.

But there are some strategies that will increase your chances:

  • Syndicate your content as much as possible: Increasing exposure naturally increases the chance your content will go viral

  • Use social media platforms: While Youtube is the father of viral content, trending on Twitter or Google+ is more feasible for business content

  • Read my colleague Krista Bunskoek (@kbunskoek)’s article The Ultimate Small Business Guide to Social Bookmarking: Driving Traffic to Your Blog and the related articles

  • Create appealing content: This one goes without saying. Unless your content is interesting, professional and well-written there’s little chance of it going viral


Top Tip #3: Use share icons: Including ‘Send’, ‘Recommend’, ‘+1’, Tweet and ‘Pin-it’ buttons increase the virality of your content by 700%.


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My Slideshare presentation above shot to more than 10,000 views in less than 10 days (8x the views of the article itself!). Why?

  • A great title

  • Solid subject-matter and writing

  • Formula articles are great for Slideshares (as 90% of the information can be communicated with a picture and a single line)

  • Good syndication and social media promotion (the social media and syndication team at Wishpond is awesome)

  • A little luck

Conclusion


Hopefully I’ve sold you on Slideshares. They’re simple, easy-to-create and awesome for your business’ online profile. Remember to optimize them for SEO, make them easy for your busy viewer to digest, and implement the strategies I’ve given above to encourage it to go viral.

Further Reading:

Have you had success with Slideshares? How about encouraging your content to go viral? Start the conversation below.

By James Scherer @Wishpond

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