How to Get Featured on Slideshare: 3 Effective Tactics to Be a Pro

For me, at the beginning, Slideshare was a simple social network where I could just upload a presentation I’d prepared for a class or event, period.

But then I took a closer look at this platform and saw some tremendous opportunity. Even if you are a marketer, a niche specialist or a brand, you can definitely take some great advantages out of it.

Just think about this stats:

1. If you are interested in the B2B industry, then you should look at the way Slideshare gains 500 percent more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

2. Do you want a platform that has more than 20% visitors coming directly from Google? Slideshare is the answer.

3. Do you want a platform where Infographics, Documents, Presentations and Videos are like a family?

4. Do you want to be seen on a platform that has more than 70 millions unique visitors / month?

Exactly. Slideshare.

In 2013, Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2013 report became the most viral presentation on SlideShare: it got 1 million views in just four days – and it keeps going up every day.

Now think about this: what if, after you write down you article, hit the publish button and share it on social media, you could re-post your article in a visual content that can be featured on a platform which has more than 70 millions professionals who want to learn about a specific topic from a subject matter expert? Exactly.

The platform was found in 2006 and joined the LinkedIn family in 2012. Since then, Slideshare got some serious numbers: 18 million uploads in 40 content categories, and it is today one of the top 100 most-visited websites in the world.

Does it ring a bell?

If you are interested in design and content marketing or you need another great platform where your brand can develop a content marketing strategy, then you should check out Slideshare!

And I want to start with Joe Pulizzi’s theory about creating content:

The goal is not to create more content but to create enough content to influence a desired behavior.

This platform has two important places where every Slideshare user wants to see his work: ‘Featured’ Section and ‘Top SlideShares‘ Section on its front page.

So after I got featured several times, I’ve considered sharing with you my ideas and thoughts on how you should create your Slideshare presentations and why you should be more interested in this platform.

• 8 types of presentations that can be uploaded on Slideshare

I will divide this article in 3 main subjects that matter when you want your presentation to be featured: trending topics, design and distribution.

Are you ready? Let’s get started:

1. Trending topics

If you work in the design industry, social media or even carpenter you definitely have a trending topic everybody talks about. Because everybody wants to talk about a hot topic and everybody has a theory about it, but not so many people are take the risk to be the leader in the industry and start to educate others about it.

This is why when you want to design a Slideshare presentation, you should look for the trending topics. And there are a lot of tools to help you find the best topic to talk about.

I recommend you to start using Twitter more for listen and less to distribute your links (yeah, I got this from Gary Vaynerchuk). Because people like to talk about ideas, theories and other events which happen around the world.

So go to https://twitter.com/search-home and start looking for what your industry is talking about, or just look up what the trending topics are at the moment.

Now that you know what people are talking about, I recommend you to go in the Slideshare Search button, type your industry name and see what others had created about your industry topic.

And now that you know what people are talking about, what other Slideshare users designed about that topic, you need to start the research part.

I have a friend who was a journalist and he told me they have 6 important questions to answer when they collect data for a subject:

Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?

Start answering these question for your topic.

Getting featured on Slideshare is not an easy work to do. Why? Because Slideshare’s homepage is manually curated by its editors.

So think about your audience and yourself when you start creating a presentation on Slideshare.

What can my audience learn from this presentation? Why should they care about it? Why is this important now?

At Bannersnack, we always look for what our audience want in that moment and how we can help them with our content.  We knew that our audience works in the design and advertising industry, this is why people always want to learn something new, optimize their work and give their best performance. So after we’ve made some research, we found out that the Instagram Ad is an important topic for our designers, advertisers and marketers.

So we designed the infographic about the Anatomy of an Instagram Ad.

This infographic was featured in major publications, such as Social Times from Adfreak and several niche websites and blogs as Design Taxi or Visual Stan.

We got a lot of shares in social media too. But we wanted to distribute it on Slideshare too, so we re-designed it in the presentation format and upload it over there.

Here you can see the presentation format.

2. Presentation Design

This is the part where I want to talk with designers and people who work in the visual industry. Ok, maybe you don’t have money to pay a designer to make this part possible, but I strongly recommend you to work with somebody who understands what is a good design and what is a bad one.

If you can’t pay a designer, then you should pay attention here and be very serious about this part. Why? Because this is the step that differentiates your presentation from others. Because this is the step that can propel you on the Slideshare homepage.

When I think about designing a Slideshare presentation I have to:

1. Create an eye-poping Cover
2. Write an interesting headline
3. Use professional fonts and high quality images
4. Don’t forget about brading
5. Be brief

A. Create an eye-popping Cover Slide

They say “don’t judge a book by its cover”, but I say you should do it. And even more, you should judge a presentation by its cover. Because if you are not interested in how your cover looks like, then I have my doubts on your presentation content.

Now look at this presentation:

Here you can see a powerful and well-designed cover slide for a presentation that every designer should look at. And yes, it was featured by Slideshare, and several time mentioned as one of the best examples on good presentations. No wonder it has more than 900,000 views.

And now look at this presentation:

B. Write an interesting headline

What is an interesting headline? Something that sounds good or something that made me click on it?

Neil Patel writes a very compelling article on how to create Powerful Headlines and I will resume it in 4 points (however, you should read the articol enterily):

Step #1:  Use specific numbers & data in your headline

Step #2:  Utilize a unique rationale

Step #3:  Call for attention

Step #4:  Use headline formulas

An interesting headline should call for your audience’s attention and make people click on your presentation.

Be unique with your headline and ultra specific. Tell them in a few simple words what they are about to find in your presentation and even what are about to learn.

When I designed this presentation I used simple words: How to create a Professional Infographic!