How to Get Qualified Trafic From Slideshare Presentations

Unless your blog is a secret diary, chances are you are looking for ways to increase your traffic. There are countless opportunities to increase your traffic, but as always content is king.

This particular opportunity I’m about to describe gets 60 million visitors per month. 

You don’t want to miss out on it, do you?

I decided to write about this platform because we’re getting great results with it.

The good news is that this “Quiet Giant of Content Marketing” is easy to handle. SlideShare is a social media website where you get to show off your slides to the world.

slideshare logo
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What’s also important is that this crowded site with highly targeted audience still has relatively low competition.

Slideshare may prove to be even more effective when it comes to getting traffic than Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest (at least from my experience). But when you combine it with the mentioned social networks you get even better results.

I know what you’re thinking- slides are lame. Not as lame as excel sheets, but they’re up there. Well my friend, I’m here to prove you wrong.

Think of other media company giants–

what is their favourite medium of display?

You guessed it. Slides!

They’re usually aesthetically pleasing, engaging and easy to consume by the audience. You can use your slides to compliment content on your blog or use it as a standalone anchor.

First Thing’s First – Prepare an Astonishing Presentation

I’m sure most of you already know this, but I feel I should say it anyway. If you’re content isn’t good don’t expect miracles to happen. Slideshare has a great discovery system and a team of curators who keep an eye out for good content– this will certainly help your presentation go viral, but it won’t happen unless you put in the work.

To get the most of Slideshare, you need to come up with great slides that are a visual representation of a story.

Your audience is just one click away from your blog. Get their attention quickly and lead them there. Your presentation has to be a magnet. How do you do that?

5 Tips to Drive Traffic From Slideshare

But, first thing first… You need to create phenomenal Slides presentation for SlideShare, and here is how you do this:

1. Choose Content That Matters

The content you will choose makes the difference between good results and great results. If you want to promote your blog choose something worth talking about in your slides. For us it’s usually a collection of helpful tips of travel. Emotional slides are always a win – try presentations about people you meet, food you tasted or anything else that forms a great collection.

You can also show something shocking or bizarre. One thing is for sure – visuals and content that have emotional impact perform well on SlideShare. One of our presentations recognised by Slideshare as the Presentation of the Day was „12 Local Customs That’ll Make You Go Hmm…” It was all about local customs and traditions that may seem shocking but are part of the local heritage.

We’ve selected 12 and illustrated them with amazing faces of people from different nations. We deliberately chose the old ones – to show their intense beauty and honesty. And people loved it.

Choose rich imagery for Slideshare presentations
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When making your first slideshare presentation, take time to choose a great topic and make a list of things that’ll illustrate it.

Remember that you are making a presentation, so you’ll choose only the best information from your list. Get rid of all the unworthy stuff. Think of slides as billboards with clear strong headlines and great quality images.

If you already wrote a bunch of blog posts with great content, consider summarizing it. Create a presentation with a teaser or summary of the post with beautiful images, statistics and catch phrases to make your audience want more!

2. Make Sure You Come Up with a Clear and Linear Structure

Remember that this is a presentation that people will view without any further explanation or additional information. It has to be striking, simple and clear. Forget about complex structures. Their focus is only on the slide that they are viewing at a given moment. Lists and stories make the best structures for presentations.

3. Create Marvellous Slides

Think of your presentation like it’s food. It tastes much better if it’s visually appealing and well presented. Spend time and attention on design when you make your presentation.

First choose the style – be brave, but stay wise. One thing is certain – it has to be clear what the style is and it should be consistent. For one of our presentations, recognised by WeAreSocial, we went for the elegant travel magazine look – it worked well as we were talking about different drinks and drinking customs around the world.

Create a great cover for your presentation
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And there’s one more thing. All our presentations are done in Keynote. We did not use Photoshop for any of it.

4. Use great fonts

Check out Font Squirrel – a great resource of free beautiful fonts. Make sure it compliments your imagery. Remember also to design a stunning cover slide. Think striking emotional image plus brave huge headline. Make it clear what the presentation is about, but don’t give away everything.

Looking at other presentations on slideshare, many people do not devote enough time to polishing up the graphics of their presentation. Perhaps if they knew how simple it was, they would.

5. Share with Care and Increase Your Reach on SlideShare

When your presentation is ready you just have to upload it. Just remember to add a relevant headline and description.

Be thorough when adding tags and choose a category your presentation fits best. It all matters as it increases the chances of people finding your presentation when they search for something inspirational or informative. You obviously want to do a good job of promoting your presentation because you want to increase the number of people you can reach with it.

One thing you just have to do is to insert your presentation in your blog to increase the number of views it gets. It’s an easy thing to do as slideshare provides an embed code to your presentation right after you upload it. In my opinion it’s great to prepare a separate post that sort of introduces or compliments the presentation.

Then the embedded presentation works best in the context and naturally resonates with your readers.

One of the goals we’ve talked about is getting more traffic to your blog using slideshare. Unfortunately, SlideShare doesn’t allow live links in the description of the presentation.

That’s bad but you have one way to bypass this problem: you can insert a live link inside your presentation. There’s just one place in which you can insert your link and still keep getting clicks. That place is your last slide.

I’m sure that if your presentation resonates with people, they will click on your link and go where you want them to. Inserting the link is one thing but making it obvious it’s there is quite a different story.

Notice that many of those who view presentation don’t know about the presence of live links that happen to be there. You can solve this problem with two simple tricks.

One thing you can do is simply insert a URL in your call to action. Just try to avoid “Click here” links and such. If you insert your URL, those who are interested (but don’t realise that there is a live link in the presentation) can insert that URL in their navigation browser.

And remember – we are all lazy, so insert a small URL on your call to action instead of some long humongous URL. Other option is inserting an arrow pointing toward the link.

Chances are that even if the person viewing the presentation doesn’t know about the live links inside it, they’ll start wondering what the arrow is all about and once they move their mouse over the link the cursor will magically change from normal to link cursor.

That’s the most you can do.

The call to action toward your blog/post/page works great when you can offer something related to the topic of your slides.

For example, if your presentation is about the amazing local customs in Asia and you have a great post about that last trip to… Asia on your blog, don’t hesitate to say it. People will be curious and more willing to click.

Use Your SlideShare Presentations to Rank Better on Google

Since SlideShare is an authority website it really ranks so much better on Google than most of the sites online, including (most likely) your blog. It is wise to use it then to bring your content to the top ranking of Google.

Let’s say that you want a high ranking for the keyword “traveling to Asia tips” Trust me, it’s gonna be very tough to rank at first place for that keyword, eespecially if you blog is relatively new and you don’t want to spend a lot on AdWords.

But a presentation on SlideShare called “10 Great Tips for Those Traveling to Asia,” will make that achievable. Our presentation Drinks and Drinking Customs Around the World ranks 3rd in Google Search results. With a relatively new blog, we wouldn’t be able to achieve that.

Getting backlinks pointing to your presentation will help increase its organic ranking.

The most effective ways are embedding your presentation on your blog post, embedding it in a guest posts and working on growing the reach of your presentation.

Remember that when embedding your presentation in a guest post for an authority blog, you can’t be spammy. Insert it only if it adds value to the post you’re contributing.

Here is an example slide for your reference:

Do let me know have you started using Slideshare for driving traffic to your blog or website?

What tools and software you are using to create slides? Do you have any additional tips for new sliders? If yes, do share with me and others via comments. Don’t forget to share this tutorial with your marketers friend .

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14 thoughts on “How to Get Qualified Trafic From Slideshare Presentations”

  1. Shailendra Singh

    Thanks Harsh and Max for bringing up Slideshare as a source of traffic. As this is not a common platform for people, the insights shared by you were rich in terms of value. No doubt, I will give it a try for my website.

  2. Ashutosh Kasera

    Hi Harsh,

    Thanks for picking up an interesting topic about increasing traffic on our blog. I have used slideshare before but never thought about it as a way to increase organic links. It seems there is no dimension that needs to be explored. Thanks once again for sharing your thoughts about it.

  3. Afzal Zaheer

    Hi,
    I liked your post as the different tips which you gave are indeed enlightening. You equally spoke about the need to provide quality content amongst other equally important and relevant tips. The post is indeed highly informative. Waiting for more such posts as well 🙂

    1. Max Zielinski

      Thanks Afzal, glad you found it useful! Check back sometime and let me know how Slideshare worked for you 🙂

  4. Max Zielinski

    Hi Drake! Thanks for the kind words. And absolutely we embed slideshare presentations to many of our blog posts. We use it to mix up the content a little bit, or it serves as a summary/teaser of our posts. Plus our audience loves to flick through the slides 🙂 And with Google it’s absolutely brilliant. We’re ranking for keywords we’d never rank for with the authority of our blog.

  5. Vinay

    Yes I have tried earlier using slide share for traffic and content and that was helpful. If you want to embed slides to your wordpress blogs, slideshare is the best option other than plugins.

    1. Max Zielinski

      True that, Vinay. True that!

  6. Edson Hale

    You are right Slideshare brings astonishing results and you see a visible change in your analytics. but this happen if you make an awesome presentation with quite unique and interesting info with their graphically excellent presentation. To do all this I think your post is great guide for us. Thanks

    1. Max

      Hey Edson,

      You’re right, I mean with the amount of content being produced, you need to make something remarkable. That being said, don’t worry about producing super niche or unique content. If you can outdo what’s already been done, go for it. We made a presentation about Drinking Customs around the World, which obviously has been done before, but we gave it our own little twist and it performed really well! I hope the guide helps!

      Cheers!

  7. Lisa

    Great tip about the link on the LAST slide of slideshare Max, I have used it with Powerpoint and have done around 8. I once made it to the front page, that got a lot of views. It doesn’t seem to help with my SEO too much though no matter how much I read that it does. I will have to try to create a really super one and see if that will nudge it along 🙂 I do love their embed feature too!

    1. Max

      Hi Lisa,

      We get indirect google traffic for keywords that it would be impossible to rank for with our blog and domain authority. So, despite the fact that the conversion rate or the amount of traffic that will actually make it to our blog through slideshare would be less than having directly ranked that high, it is better than nothing. Additionally we get our name out there and this aligns with our content strategy. Congratulations on being featured, it gives a nice little boost, doesn’t it 🙂

  8. Drake Johnson

    Embedding the slide in our blog will definitely increase our visitors, also the views and helps our blog to rank better on Google. What better could we get? I think its the simplest way of increasing loads of traffic for our blog. Best tips. Thanks Max Zielinski.
    Regards.

    1. Max Zielinski

      Hi Drake,

      Thanks for you kind words. We embed presentations on our blog to supplement our posts all the time and the audience loves it. Sometimes we remix our post a little and make it into a presentation or we make one that serves as a teaser/summary of the post. We also found that Slideshare has a great team of curators and if you put in the work to make a engaging deck in your niche chances are they’ll feature it or mention on their social media. Gives a nice boost!

      Best of luck with your decks and fire away if you have any questions!

      1. Drake Johnson

        Again thanks for the information sir. 🙂
        I’ll try to make my posts better by working on the slides too. Hope it’ll work for me too.
        Regards.

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