How to Gain a Bigger Audience In Minutes

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Chances are you are here because you are creating content. And chances are you are creating that content to promote your business. If that’s the case, then one of your main priorities is likely to attract an audience, right? You’re not creating content for it to sit an a vacuum…you want people to see it.

Well I’m going to show a dead simple way to expose yourself to new people (get your mind out of the gutter) with very little extra work.

A while back I shared an infographic about SlideShare being the quiet giant of content marketing. While everyone else is obsessing over Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest, there are really very few platforms that provide you with the content marketing power that SlideShare does. And clearly LinkedIn saw the potential when they purchased the platform for nearly $119 million.

What is SlideShare?

SlideShare is a sharing platform. As you can tell by it’s name, it was originally intended for the sharing of presentations (i.e. PowerPoint – hence “Slide” in the name).

However, sharing on the platform isn’t limited to only slides. You can also share documents (in PDF format for example).

There is an option for a PRO account, but the free one will do just fine for the purposes of gaining more exposure for your content and your brand.

Using SlideShare to Gain Exposure

So how do I use SlideShare to get more exposure? It’s simple. Your reaction will most likely be to roll your eyes and think you’re wasting your time. But hear me out…

Gaining exposure is as simple as…sharing your content. But there’s a twist. You don’t have to create new content to share. In fact, your existing blog posts will do just fine.

In fact, SlideShare content may quite often outrank your existing content due to the shear power of the platform itself.

My Blog Post Experiment 

I decided to take my own advice and test out SlideShare. After all, I supported the idea that it was “quiet giant” of content marketing.

I created a free Blogger blog and wrote up a few blog posts. I even did a little backlinking (mostly in the way of social bookmarking because those take the least effort).

I chose Blogger for two reasons:

1. It’s free
2. I saw a lot of funky things happening during the Panda update. One of which was huge jumps in rankings for blogs based on the Blogger platform. Apparently Google didn’t want to upset the “big sites” even if they were guilty of shady practices (there are countless stories of this). One of the side effects was that content sitting in the subdomain of a high PR domain got a big boost. a lot of people took advantage of this by creating content on completely unrelated websites because they could rank almost instantly (I saw some pretty funny content on Ice Cube’s fan page).

Then, I let it simmer.

A few days later, I went to work on SlideShare. “Work” is a bit of an overstatement. It was just a four step process…

1. Copy the blog post.
2. Paste the blog post into Word.
3. Save the the Word document as a PDF.
4. Upload it to SlideShare.

Yep, that’s it. Repurposing content at its finest and simplest.

The Result

After a few days of existence, the Blogger blog was nowhere to be seen on Google. to be fair, it’s a pretty competitive keyword so I would expect ranking to take some work.

And the SlideShare “report”?

On page 3 after a single day with 42 views. No new content, and no SEO, necessary.

How? But what About Duplicate Content? 

The internet went up in arms about the latest Google Panda update. The claim was that the update wouldn’t punish any websites, but rather promote the quality ones and that only 3% of websites would be affected.

And more weight was  supposed to be give to the original content.

I call shenanigans! 

Based on a personal experience with one of my niche sites, I know for a fact that websites got punished. And often for no good reason. And based on this experiment, being the first to publish something isn’t good enough.

As I mentioned before, the “big sites” always get the benefit of the doubt from Google. In other words, you can be the first to publish something, but if Mashable decides to just steal it and run with it, you’re screwed. Moreover, you’ll probably be looked at as the thief.

When you upload something to SlideShare, you are publishing content directly to a PR8 site. On top of that, SlideShare scans your document and creates a transcription that is readable by Google. Think that’ll get indexed fast? My experiment proves it will. 

But Wait, There’s More! 

SlideShare is a huge platform with a huge user base. There are hundreds of thousands of documents uploaded each month. 

A huge user base means a good potential for exposure even without ranking in Google. People browse around SlideShare – and SlideShare provides them with “related” documents and presentations (much like YouTube displays related videos).

Going Beyond SlideShare

Well now you have your document ready. It would be a shame not to make the most of your “efforts.”

I was quite astounded by the result (and the lack of importance placed on originality of the content). So here are three more document sharing sites I plan on uploading my “report” to in order to prolong this experiment:

• Scribd (PR8)
• DocStoc (PR6)
• Calameo (PR5)

Ready to get to “work”?

Your Two Cents: 

Do you use document sharing sites for your marketing?
If so, what kind of results have you seen?
Should it bother us that un-original content can so easily outrank original content?
Should we ever trust anything that Google says ?