Top 10 Reasons to Use SlideShare to Market Your Business

In the never-ending quest to find more ways to promote your business online, there are more opportunities than simply using social media and your website/blog. One of the most overlooked options is SlideShare. Here are the top 10 reasons why you should be using SlideShare to market your business now.

1. An excellent source of traffic

In a word: distribution. Sure, there are millions of people who go online every day and head straight to Facebook… but there are also millions of them who are looking for quality content on topics of interest, and a vast majority of them end up on SlideShare. In fact, SlideShare receives more than 60 million unique visitors each month. That’s a lot of potential viewers of your presentation, and possibly your website.

2. Qualified Traffic of Entrepreneurs

SlideShare’s main demographic is business people. These are users looking for high-quality content, particularly for B2B purposes (a recent visit to Alexa.com showed that most of the site’s top searches were business-related). With the right labels, you can easily attract the customers you’re looking for.

3. Lead Generation

Every small business owner is looking for sales opportunities, right? Did you know that you can add a lead generation form to your SlideShare presentation? Simply select the option that adds a short form where viewers can leave their information to download your presentation and request more information (it’s up to you where it’s inserted, beginning, middle, or end). These leads can even be integrated into third-party CRM software programs like Salesforce.

4. Ability to embed complex layouts

A really cool feature of SlideShare presentations is the ability to enhance them with audio, video, lots of images, and a complex design that makes them eye-catching. You can upload presentations on everything from your annual P&L to a full eBook, infographic, or how-to video.

5. Analytics

When you opt for an entry-level paid account, you also get access to analytics for your content. You can find out who is accessing your presentations, where they are being referred from, and which ones are most popular with your target market.

6.Easy optimization

It is no less difficult to upload any type of content here than it is to upload a video to YouTube. SlideShare intuitively discovers what type of content it is (video, audio, etc.), automatically formats it horizontally or vertically, and even extracts text from your presentation to use as meta tags. It doesn’t get any easier than that to optimize content online!

7. Quality inbound links

Because SlideShare is a highly rated site, the inbound links from the site are great for SEO. All you have to do is link your SlideShare presentations to your website to get a quality inbound link.

8. Earn loyal followers

Just like on YouTube, users can subscribe to your SlideShare content to get notified whenever you post new slideshows. These are the people who are already interested in your content and should easily become customers. Plus, you can find people you already know through social networking sites and email contacts and connect with them on SlideShare.

9. Connect to social networks

When LinkedIn recently bought SlideShare, the move allowed LinkedIn users to add slideshows to their profile. This is another great way to create highly rated cross-site links and allow your social media followers easy access to content.

10. Presentations become a digital marketing kit

Can you quickly tell potential customers where to find information about your business in a visual format (which most people prefer)? Put together a SlideShare presentation that doubles as a digital marketing kit and can provide a one-click link to your request for more information. Don’t forget to add a lead capture form!

SlideShare is a very affordable way for a small business to create professional presentations that will reach a wide audience while building high-quality links. Create a presentation in almost any software, upload your content, and you’ll have new leads in your office in no time!