Ever heard of SlideShare? It’s a site that hosts your slide deck from Powerpoint or Keynote. It’s one of those great content marketing platforms most people have never heard of.

Here are some notable stats to start: SlideShare ranks among the top 150 websites, attracting 60 million visitors each month and generating 3 billion slide views monthly (that’s 1,140 slides every second). The traffic is strong, and it’s the ideal type for many content marketers—it’s very professional. ComScore reports that SlideShare receives five times more visits from business owners compared to other well-known sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

I won’t delve further into why it’s a useful tool, instead I’d like to give you ten ways to use it successfully:

1. Use existing content

Chances are that you will have a number of Powerpoint presentations kicking about on your hard drive. What company doesn’t have a sales presentation? An employer branding piece? A few slides about a recent product launch? As long as they don’t contain any confidential information, go ahead and upload these to SlideShare and you immediately have content. You can of course change them before you upload, you might want to change images, update figures or cut out a few slides in the deck.

2. Keep it simple

When I upload a presentation to SlideShare, I’ll typically take out about half the slides. I’ll leave the visually interesting and self-explanatory ones, as the viewer won’t hear me talk about the content. Nobody wants to sit through a 70-slide deck in an auditorium and nobody wants to see even half than that online so keep it simple instead and get your message across in a brief manner. Some of the best presentations I’ve seen are only about 10 slides long and contain very few words.

I only realised that you can add hyperlinks to a SlideShare deck a few months ago. This means that you can add a link to your website or Twitter on the front page and last page, in case anyone loves your presentation you want to make it easy for them to contact you of course. When I put slides up about LinkedIn for instance, I of course link that to our LinkedIn training workshops in London.

4. Use the right keywords for SEO

SlideShare has an internal search engine where visitors pull searches every day, most of these will be researchers out on a fact-finding mission. On top of that the content also ranks really well in external searche engines like Google and Bing, use this to your advantage. Just like a YouTube video, it’s important to use the right title, description and tags in order for it to be found online. Instead of calling your presentation “Annual Parks Report”, try “London Parks Facts and Figures by Borough and Councils” – the latter one is full of keywords that people will use to searches.

5. Embed here and there

A great feature with SlideShare is the fact that you can embed your presentations on websites, blog posts or anywhere else you can think of. This mean anyone can host your presentation on their blog but with a link back to your SlideShare account. This can work really well when writing a blog post about a topic, you add more weight to your argument with a presentation embedded.

In fact, I write a quick blog post around every most public presentations I give, an example is How To Build Your Personal Brand on Social Media [Slides].

LinkedIn offers its users very few cool applications but the SlideShare integration is one of them. By adding the SlideShare app on LinkedIn, you can automatically display your most recent presentation on your LinkedIn profile. Or you can set it to whichever presentation you feel represents you the best, you can even show two decks on your profile. Everytime you upload a new presentation to SlideShare, it updates your profile and it sends out a notification to your network’s homefeed indicating there’s new content to have a look at on your profile.

7. SlideShare surprise

My party trick when speaking at a conference is to upload my deck to SlideShare early in the morning. I then schedule a tweet linking to the presentation to go out when I should be up on the podium speaking (using the event hashtag of course). When I do speak I mention something like “right about now a tweet is going out linking to this presentation by the way”. This has generated thousands of views of my presentations from all around the world.

8. Check the stats of your presentations

By having a look at how many views, comments and shares your presentations get you’ll get an idea for what people out there are interested in. And perhaps what they aren’t interested in. Just like with any content marketing strategy, it’s about monitoring what works and try to do more of just that. You’ll get even more interesting stats if you upgrade…

9. Go pro if you want leads

OK if you are really serious about your presentations and feel that they will lead to solid business, you can upgrade your account. This will then give you analytics of who’s viewing your decks and SlideShare will present you with up to 30 leads per month. You can get your own branding on your account and you can do private uploads as well. My rule of thumb is as with all freemium models, only go pro when you’ve mastered the basics.

10. Check out other people’s decks for inspiration

Finally, you’ll probably get into the whole presentation thing now after realising what SlideShare can do for you. This raises the bar and you now want to make even greater decks for yor audience. If you find yourself stuck for what to put on your next slide, fear not. Have a look at similar presentations on SlideShare to get ideas from your peers. Or check out the ‘Most Popular Today‘ section on the site, this is where some of the best presentations in the world are featured. Pick and mix your ideas and transform it into your content.

Any more ideas around SlideShare? Please let me know in the comments!