5 Secret Ways to Instantly Become More Effective with Slideshare Presentations

SlideShare is a powerful platform for promoting your products and services and for helping to build your brand.

SlideShare has over 60 million users, and it is a particularly important channel if you’re marketing to other businesses.  You may think that, because it’s called SlideShare, it’s just for sharing slideshare presentations.  However, while you can share slides (presentations), you can also share documents, infographics and videos on the platform.

In this article, we’ll take a look at five different ways to become more effective on the site.

SlideShare Statistics

• 60 million unique users per month
• 400,000 new SlideShare presentations per month
• More than 10 million presentations uploaded every month.

"SlideShare receives 500% more traffic from business owners than Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter."

1. Build your presentation using Haiku Deck

The problem with presentations is that they are time consuming to create, but Haiku Deck cuts down on the time required to prepare them.  Haiku Deck is a tool for creating presentations and it integrates with SlideShare to allow you to add your presentations directly to the site.

Here’s how it works:

When you launch the tool, you will see a simple interface.  You start off by picking a background template (you can use your own template if you want) and then selecting the format of your starting slide.

There are six templates to choose from (two are displayed across the top of the image below) and four different slide formats.

Select the theme and then pick your first slide format

You can now start adding content to the slides.

One nice feature of Haiku Deck is the ability to select and add images that you can search for through the tool.  The images displayed have Creative Commons licensing, which means that you don’t have to pay for them as long as you give credit to the owner of the image.

You can search through a large database of images

If you want to add graphs to your presentation, you can select from three different styles.  It’s very easy to edit/update the content on them.

Select from three different graph types and customize as required

Summary – Haiku Deck is a very easy-to-use tool for creating presentations.  You are restricted in the options you have to make a presentation, but these restrictions help with simplicity.  You can easily build a presentation very quickly for SlideShare using Haiku Deck.

2.  Create your imagery using Canva

If you want to get a little fancier with your slides, Canva is a super cool image creation tool that provides graphic design capability, even if you don’t have any graphic design skills!

When you start off with Canva, you can select the types of images you want to create.  If you select the presentation style, then you are presented with a range of templates that are suitable for slides for a presentation.  There are over 100 to choose from.

When you choose one of them, you can start adjusting the image/text size and changing the colors of the text.

It’s very easy to adjust the image size, text, colors etc

There’s also a large suite of colorful and useful text boxes that you can add to your presentation.

Select from a large variety of colorful images you can use for your slides

You can also upload your own images and/or search from a database of over 1,000,000 images.

Summary – Canva is a very simple tool to use and you’ll be surprised how quickly you can create slides that look great.  You will probably need to use Canva in conjunction with presentation software (e.g. Powerpoint) as it only produces images or PDF documents.

3. Add clickable links

Most presentations on SlideShare don’t have clickable links, but it absolutely makes a lot of sense to add them.

If you add clickable links to the first three slides on your presentation, SlideShare will disable them so they won’t work!  But you can add links on other slides.

So, how do you add these links?

You do it in the same way as you would add any link to any other presentation.  For example, add a button with some call-to-action text to your slide, and select the menu option ‘Insert’, followed by ‘Hyperlink’.

Here, you add in the hyperlink to the relevant page of your website.

Yes it’s that easy!  So why isn’t everybody doing it?  We don’t know, but we think they should be!

Here’s an example of a clickable link from a HubSpot presentation.  Go to the last slide and you’ll see three clickable links on the last page.

6 Steps to Building User Personas and Why You Should Care

4. Create charts with ChartBlocks

ChartBlocks is a very nicely designed and easy-to-use online tool for creating charts.  Charts are great for giving people an easier visual to understand complex data.

With ChartBlocks, you can specify your data set, create a chart, export it as an image and then include it as part of your presentation.

To create a chart, you enter in your content in a table or import it from an external source.  You then select the type of chart you want and configure it to suit your needs.  Here’s how an example chart looks (the configuration options are on the left).

This is how the configuration looks for charts

When you’re creating the chart there is a lot of flexibility, for example:

• Change dimensions – adjust the size of the graph that you want to publish
• Change fonts, colors, background image color, etc.
• Adjust line thickness of axis, grid, etc.
• Change any text surrounding the graph.

So, if you want to create graphs and you’re looking for something easier than Excel, ChartBlocks is a good alternative.

5. Optimization when you upload

When you upload your content to SlideShare, you need to consider how it will be indexed and found, both on SlideShare and on Google.

Here are some practical tips:

• File name – Ideally, you will put the keywords you want to rank for in the filename used to access the presentation.
• Title – The title of the presentation will be used by Google to index this content and will be displayed in search results.  But Google only uses the first 65 (sometimes a little bit more if there’s lots of narrow characters) characters, so pay attention to this when you are uploading.  This is also important for SlideShare indexing.
• Description – The first 155 characters of the description will be displayed in Google search results.  In SlideShare itself, you can have a much longer description so you need to write for Slideshare and for Google.  Write a compelling summary in the first 155 characters and then a more detailed description to follow this.
• Tags – These are important to make sure your content can be found within SlideShare.
• Category – Make sure you have the correct categories so that, when users on SlideShare are filtering based on category, they can find your presentation.
• Links within the content – As mentioned already, after the first three slides you can include links within your SlideShare content.  This ensures you get more traffic to your website when people do actually see your slides.
• Content – Make sure your content includes relevant keywords that you want to rank for.  This is the same as including the keywords or related keywords within the content of a blog post.
• Sharing – Make sure your settings allow people to share/embed your presentation.  The more views, shares and embeds you get,  the better.

Summary

SlideShare is a powerful platform, particularly in the the B2B space.  One of the best ways to use SlideShare is to take your blog post content and hire someone to create slideshare presentations based on it.  You need to always make sure that the presentations are visually appealing and optimized correctly for search.

Do you use SlideShare?  Have you seen any benefits as a result?

As usual, I would love to hear your thoughts.

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