How I Landed on the Front Page of SlideShare - Bright Ideas for eCommerce Entrepreneurs

A few months ago, we made an effort to do a better job of sharing and promoting our content. The initial results were quite impressive, so we hired a full time VA who primarily focuses on content promotion, and we’ve continued to refine and revise our strategies.

After reading a blog post by Chris Ducker where he described how he made it to the homepage of SlideShare, we decided to give it a shot. On our second try, we too landed on the front page of SlideShare (and generated over 21,000 views).

How Did We Do It?

We posted on SlideShare on a Monday. We spent a full day tweeting about the SlideShare once an hour for 24 hours.

This probably had the biggest affect on initiating traffic, since Twitter is a significant source of our traffic.

We also shared the SlideShare with LinkedIn groups that we belong to, as well as on Pinterest, our Facebook page, and on google+.

We had hoped to do all the sharing on Monday, but due to miscommunication (and our VA helping us working in a different time zone), this all happened over the course of 48 hours, mostly on Tuesday and then Wednesday morning.

We didn’t reach the front page until later on Wednesday, and stayed there until Thursday afternoon.

Lessons Learned

At the start of this post, I mentioned that we didn’t land on the front page on the first try. After our first SlideShare was viewed a few hundred times (with no large boost in traffic to our site), we spent more time researching what makes SlideShares popular. Instructive (how to) shares seemed to fare pretty well.

So, we focused our second SlideShare on teaching something of value. We chose to repurpose a past post on How I Produce My Podcast into How To Produce A Podcast (And Use It To Get More Clients), because that title screen made it very clear WHAT people would learn, as well as WHY they would want to learn it.

Here’s the original SlideShare:

Summary

The more places you can promote your content, the better. SlideShare is just one option, and it works best when combined with other promotional strategies. Check out our past interviews from Twitter expert Mark Schaefer, LinkedIn expert Viveka von Rosen, and Pinterest expert Jessica Rhodes for ideas specific to those sites. (I go into even more detail on exactly how we do content promotion in my Digital Marketing Handbook.)

Our goal going forward is to make future SlideShares just as informative, as well as more visually appealing.