SlideShare offers numerous opportunities for enhanced personal and corporate brand building.
SlideShare offers an efficient way for authors, individuals, and self-employed professionals to build their personal brand in a search engine and social media-optimized environment.
Authors, job hunters, and self-employed professionals can post PowerPoint presentations online, where they can attract viewers, enhance your online presence, and direct traffic to your blog posts and website.
SlideShare advantages
One of the biggest advantages of SlideShare is that it offers an easy way to leverage your existing knowledge of presentation software like PowerPoint.
Use SlideShare to host PowerPoint presentations as well as Adobe Acrobat PDF file’s such as newsletters, resumes, repots, sample chapters, and white papers.
After uploading presentations to SlideShare, you can add audio narration to your presentations. You can also insert YouTube videos.
You can embed your presentations in your blog or website, and allow others to download and embed them, too. You can also password-protect access to your presentations.
SlideShare options
You can get started on SlideShare and share 5 presentations for free. By upgrading to SlideShare’s Pro levels, which begin at $19.00 a month, you can take advantage of powerful analytics, meeting hosting, capturing leads, and tracking presentation effectiveness.
Todd Wheatland’s The Marketer’s Guide to SlideShare: How to Build Your Brand, Generate Leads, and Create Opportunities is the definitive guide to SlideShare.
I created and uploaded my first SlideShare presentation the same day I read Todd Wheatland’s Marketer’s Guide to SlideShare!
Tips for Personal Branding Success with SlideShare
Here are some ways to take maximum advantage of the capabilities built into SlideShare:
- Choose a SEO-friendly slide title. Make sure your presentation title contains your most important keywords–and in the right order. The title you provide becomes your presentation’s URL and page title. Keep titles as short as possible–less than 70 characters. The first 34 characters are most important.
- Design a high-impact title slide. The title slide is the first slide in your presentation. It deserves special care. It’s as important to your presentation’s success as the front cover of a book. Title slides must look good online at thumbnail, i.e., very small, size. Your title slide must make a promise and offer a benefit. It has to differentiate your presentation from competing presentations.
- Provide a compelling description. SlideShare allows you to use up to 3,000 characters describing your presentation. Engaging and detailed descriptions attract more search engine traffic. Pay particular attention to the first 160 characters, however, which (by default) are what visitors see before they click “read more.”
- Add tags. SlideShare allows you to add up to 20 tags, or keywords, to each presentation. Visitors can add an additional 5 tags. Monitor the tags that visitors add to your presentations and consider using them in your future presentations.
- Provide Speaker Notes. One of PowerPoint’s most under-utilized features is the ability to create notes, (View>Notes Pages), for rehearsing your presentation. You’ll find notes helpful when adding audio. Speaker Notes can greatly enhance your presentation’s search engine optimization.
- Enhance your presentations. Add audio narration to your presentations after uploading them to SlideShare. You can easily sync your pre-recorded audio with the slides in your presentation.
- Review your profile. You’re given an opportunity to add an extensive profile when setting up your SlideShare account. Later, review what you wrote and make sure it not only tells your personal brand story, but does it as compellingly as possible. Add your Twitter feed to your profile page, and verify the correctness of all social media links.
After uploading your first 5 presentation for free, explore the advantages of SlideShare’s Pro-level options. Pay particular attention to their updated Analytics reporting and the Lead Capturing options which can pay immediate dividends.
Explore your files and hard drive for “evergreen” content ideas that you can reformat and use as the basis for SlideShare presentations.
Are you building your personal brand with SlideShare?
If you’re a SlideShare user, consider sharing your personal brand-building experiences, ideas, and time-saving tips as comments, below. Be sure to include links to your SlideShare presentations.
Author:
Roger C. Parker invites you to view his latest SlideShare presentation, 12 Months of Content Marketing Ideas for SlideShare or ask him a writing question.
