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Slideshare is a content marketing giant that flies slightly under the radar. Many bloggers and marketers do not seem to be fully aware of the potential of Slideshare and how they can easily jump right in and get something out of their efforts by “simply“ creating some outstanding slides and uploading them on Slideshare.

Last year, over three years after being acquired by LinkedIn Slideshare rebranded as LinkedIn Slideshare. As a LinkedIn service, it is also possible to easily add your Slideshare presentations to your LinkedIn profile.

Here are a few tips on what Slideshare can do for your marketing and traffic/lead generation.

1. Slideshare is huge but not (yet) overcrowded

Slideshare is a platform similar to Youtube but for slides in various formats like .ppt, .pdf, keynote or OpenDocument. You can upload your presentations and choose to make them private or public. The slides can be viewed directly on the platform or embedded into other sites.

The initial idea for Slideshare was to provide a platform where employees could share their slides, but meanwhile, users found multiple use cases including entertainment.

Slideshare also includes some social network functionalities like comments, likes, and ratings. By 2015 Slideshare hat over 70 Mio visitors per month and 38 Mio registered users. According to Social Media Examiner, Slideshare is the number 8 most commonly used social network.

Slideshare actually gets 500% more traffic from B2B Marketers than Facebook and Twitter.

2. Slides can upgrade your content

We have already mentioned in other articles how important visuals are for your content success. A Slideshare presentation is another way of adding a visual way of consuming the information in your content. Slideshare presentations can simply be embedded into your posts.

Your Slideshare presentations will give your audience an additional way of consuming the information. As a start, you could turn one of your best list posts into a simple Slideshare presentation and embed that presentation into your post.

3. Slideshare lets you find a new audience

Now, you may think that a Slideshare presentation (on Slideshare) is just another piece of content on an additional platform you have to promote and find an audience for. That is only partly true.

Of course, you need to share the hell out of your Slideshare presentation and help it find an audience. If you do, you will probably notice that people in other social networks like to click on links to Slideshare presentations, too.

But Slideshare is a social network that comes with an own audience. 20% of the visitors on Slideshare come directly from Google. Because Slideshare got it right with Google: The presentations often rank very high in the search results and thus Google can drive massive traffic to your presentation. More on how to make your Slideshare presentations rank with Google later.

Slideshare also has a build in search algorithm. Many people look for information directly on Slideshare. Presentations are often a great way to tap into new or complicated matters, browse around for yourself you will be surprised how much valuable information is on Slideshare for you to consume. Your presentation could be among all that great content that people love to discover.

4. Slideshare has the power to drive traffic

Yes, it is possible to drive traffic from Slideshare. Many brands, bloggers and business owners got that right. All you need is a presentation that gets many views and a call-to-action strategically placed within the presentation.

Ana Hofman from Traffic Generation Cafe is a great example: She was new to Slideshare and showed how to get it right in a short time without the need to build a following in a new social network. She created 9 presentations and achieved over 200k views and over 1400 clicks back to her blog Traffic Generation Cafe.

5. Slideshare lets your content rank better in Google

Google loves Slideshare; I mentioned that before. To help your own ranking, you have to make your presentation rank. Since you are going to upload your slides to Slideshare, the first step towards a great Google ranking is already done. Now you have to consider some additional factors and use the assets of Slideshare in an optimal way:

• Include your most important keywords at the beginning of the description of your presentation
• Link to other social profiles and make it easy for Google to make the connection between your Slideshare and other social accounts
• Include your target SEO keyword in the title of your presentation
• To help the ranking of your presentation you can try to get more backlinks to your presentation.

6. Slideshare offers cloud storage

Slideshare also gives you free cloud storage. Free membership allows you to upload an unlimited number of presentations. All of these presentations you can reuse somewhere else or simply embed on your own blog or website.

Learn how to build an audience in social media, generate leads and get customers with “The Social Traffic Code!”

7. Generate Leads

Slideshare also offers some lead generation features. For instance, the option that people can only download your presentation if the put in their email address. Slideshare provides you with extensive functionality like Lead Forms to help you generate leads from your slides. You can also analyze your generated leads and decide whether you need to change something.

8. Slideshare presentations do not need to be huge

If you now think you do not have the time to create any number of presentations with an endless number of slides, that is not necessary. Studies show that the longest presentations are not the best performing. A really short presentation of 10 slides can already do the trick. Plus, you do not have to write a new novel, more words are not always better either…

Slideshare presents a vast opportunity for an audience, branding and driving traffic. As always the results will depend on the quality of the content. How to create great Slideshare presentations is a topic for another blog post.

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