SlideShare is a great way to drive traffic, email signs, trials and much more.  With 60 million visitors per month and 130 million page views it’s one of the top social content destination sites for marketers. But beyond just uploading your last conference presentation and hoping that there were enough people that really liked it – there are ways to hack SlideShare to amplify your presence and the number of people that view your presentations.  We’ll offer some of these strategies today to ensure that you are crushing all the goals you have for SlideShare.

Determine your goals

As with any of your marketing activities, if you define your goals first you will be able to better target and refine everything you do on that network.  You goals can be varied and range from

• More Marketing qualified leads
• Website traffic
• Trials
• Downloads (content / product)
• Lead nurturing
• Etc

Even if you only write a few bullet points on what your goals are and how you will measure progress on those goals then you will at least have something to use while tracking these goals.

Basics to keep in mind for every presentation

1. Take a look at what is popular on the homepage of SlideShare at what is popular.  In general you will find that presentations that have nice visuals, are not text heavy, offer useful information without heavy promotion, and have a little bit of personality perform very well.  Try to implement as many of these as possible as you are building your SlideShare presentation to ensure it stands out.
2. Browse through the top 10 presentations in the category of the one you are creating and see how many shares each has.  Ensure to offer a spin on the others with your own content – but you can learn a lot from these top 10.
3. Use pictures and screenshots to explain your story as well as text.  However be sure to use enough text that anyone online can understand the story you are telling. This is a balance that you will need to explore and fine tune.
4. Keep in short.  People’s attention spans are generally shorter now so do your best to get your message across in 15 slides, and if you need more than 15 slides see point # 11.
5. Before uploading your presentation, conduct a few searches to find relevant tags.  Have 3-5 in mind before uploading your presentation as it will help others find it.  You can always go back later and add tags but it’s good to have the first few in mind when you upload the presentation.
6. Embed links in your PowerPoint / Keynote file, then convert to PDF before uploading to SlideShare — this will preserve most links within the presentation and make them clickable.
7. Use an account that closely represents your business name.  This will help others think of you (and find more information on your company) if they are interested.  This can also help drive referral traffic to your website.
8. Use a URL shortener for any links that you are embedding so you can track how many are clicking on individual slides and links within your presentation.
9. Find leaders in your space and follow them on SlideShare.

Growth hacks for your presentations

1. While browsing through the top 10 presentations – look at each of the titles that work well and use words that will attract visitors.
2. Consider using a variant of the “Creative Commons” license when uploading a presentation if the content is applicable.  If everything in the presentation is your own work and information, then a Creative Commons license can allows others to remix, distribute, and change your presentation while giving credit to you for the original presentation.  You can find more about the Creative Common license types here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/.
3. Offer a way to spread content virally with a Click to Tweet link (just as above ensure it is embedded within other text) that features a hashtag you are actively monitoring or mentions your company Twitter account.
4. Have a Call to Action (CTA) at the end of your presentation that points people to your site for related content or other content that will help them through the funnel, for example “For more information on this topic, click here to download this ebook”.
5. Post a pre-event primer presentation on SlideShare.  For instance, if you are going to be talking about your location based marketing software than create a primer presentation that asks people who will be in the audience what specifically they want to hear and how familiar they are with this type of solution.
6. Post a rebuttal to another presentation.
7. Google will likely index your SlideShare presentation within search results – ensure to consider other search results when naming your presentation.
8. Once your presentation shows up within search results (you should know if you have Google Alerts setup, otherwise just manually search for it) ensure to +1 the link and share within your Google Plus communities as appropriate.
9. Embed your SlideShare presentation in other content to enhance it’s value to the audience.  For example, embed it in a blog post or reference a statistic or two from the presentation in an ebook.
10. Turn your SlideShare presentation into a recorded video on YouTube of you actually teaching the material or sharing it with an audience.
11. Share your presentation on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks that you/your company participates in.
12. Want to generate leads right from your presentation?  Try signing up for a Pro Account which allows you to enter a lead form.  For only $19 /month you can generate 30 leads.

What other tips do you have or have you used with your presentations?

Image credit: ambedo