I just happened to perform a great traffic trick yesterday; and totally by accident. It involves SlideShare and LinkedIn. I’m a big fan of LinkedIn, it is like Facebook for business people but I had never used SlideShare until yesterday (I had the account, but never actually did anything with it).
Earlier this week I was watching some nice PowerPoint presentations and quite a few were hosted at SlideShare.net. That got my attention so I decided to do some research and found out that SlideShare was huge!
SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing all kinds of presentations, not just PowerPoints. It gets over 50 million monthly visitors and is one of the most visited 250 websites in the world. SlideShare content spreads virally through blogs and social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Spreads virally, eh? That mention got my interest! I decided it was time to make my first SlideShare thingy. Here it is, but don’t start watching it now.
Ok, once I created this 15-slide master piece of mine it was time to upload it to SlideShare. I logged in to my dormant account and uploaded the beast. Once there I added some keywords and descriptions to the file and thought, cool. -But whos’ going to see this?
Then I saw some familiar looking social sharing buttons next to my presentation and clicked a few. When I clicked on the LinkedIn share -button a pop-up window opened up with some choices. There are several options how you can share stuff on LinkedIn. You can share normally on your own wall or you can post to LinkedIn Groups. Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I posted this thing to all the groups I belong to? So I did, and went on my well earned lunch break.
During lunch something had happened. I received an email from SlideShare. Bang!
“Facebook Advertising Guide” is being talked about on LinkedIn more than anything else on SlideShare right now. So we’ve put it on the homepage of SlideShare.net (in the “Hot on LinkedIn” section).
Well done!
– SlideShare Team
My presentation was being featured right on the SlideShare homepage! At the bottom of it, and below the fold, but still I was happy as a clam about this unexpected fame. Excited about this I did a few more Tweets and a few Facebook posts and I was trying to email all my contacts about this but SlideShare couldn’t import my Gmail account for some reason, so I left it at that and went on doing some other important stuff for the day.
Six hours later I received another email from SlideShare. Double Bang!
Your presentation Facebook Advertising Guide is currently being featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team. We thank you for this terrific presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everyday.
P.S – Why not blog/twitter this and let the world know about this awesome masterpiece you have created? We have tweeted about this here.
Wow! I was now being featured on their ‘Featured’ -section at the top part of the screen. There it is on the first row on the right hand side:
As you can see my little presentation had gained 1.857 views so far. And this is just in a few hours from producing it and uploading it! Is that crazy or what?!
Ok, time to calm down now and do some semi-scientific analysis of what just happened.
In my view the reason I received this awesome treatment on SlideShare must lie in LinkedIn. When I posted on the LinkedIn Groups (about 15 of them) that action was recorded by SlideShare and gave me the position on their homepage in the ‘Hot On LinkedIn‘ -section; so that sort of broke the ice.
Once it hit the SlideShare home page the presentation was gaining rapidly some additional exposure and this elevated it into the ‘Featured‘ -category. I don’t think I would have received similar results if I hadn’t posted it on the LinkedIn Groups.
How To Use LinkedIn and SlideShare To Get Some Crazy Traffic To Your Website
So, the recipe to get some good traffic is this:
1. Make a short presentation of the thing that you do
2. Upload it to SlideShare
3. Use the built in sharing functions that SlideShare offers. For me the trick was sharing it with my LinkedIn Groups, but for you you it could be Facebook or Twitter.
4. Repeat with your next presentation
Ok, that’s it. Thanks for reading so far! It would be cool if you could click on some of the social sharing buttons on this post to help me spread the word.
Next week we’re going to talk more about LinkedIn as I’m presenting a guest post from Mr. LinkedIn Marketing himself, Lewis Howes. It should be great!
Let me know if you have been using SlideShare and or LinkedIn in your marketing and what kind of results have you been getting. If you haven’t used SlideShare yet, maybe it’s time to do so.
Kris Olin, MSc (Econ.) * Editor in Chief at Social Media Revolver * Web Designer * SEO Specialist * Author of the Facebook Advertising Guide. Follow Kris on Twitter and LinkedIn. See his photos at Flickr.