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Back in January I set myself the goal of using SlideShare more. Why you might ask?

Why?

This developed from my passion to optimise for your own name and use your social media profiles as a way to enhance your career rather than hide away from. In terms of SEO, Slideshare and other social networking sites have extremely strong, authoritative domains.

Having strong profiles on these domains is an easy way to make a ‘land grab’ for your brand or in this case my name. This is a big deal as we see a switch from employers reading the traditional CV to performing the equivalent of a background check on prospective employees.

Google my name and you’ll see there are variations of it, one being a lawyer and several others based in the UK and in the US. I want to make sure that my name is being represented correctly.

Point to prove

Here lies the potential issue, bearing in mind my background and experience is in online marketing and SEO, surely a good way to display knowledge and prove that is by;

a) occupying the search space for my name

b) testing and subsequently helping clients, colleagues or anyone else with my findings from using the top social media sites

Whilst these two points aren’t the be all and end all, they are key considerations in terms of up taking a thought leadership strategy. For one these are the spaces that many brands want to occupy and the sites used are the sites that brands are (or should be) looking to build communities on.

How to create great slides in PowerPoint

Whilst this presentation wasn’t my first on SlideShare, it proved to be my most successful so far and this is probably testament to the amount of effort put into creating it.

 

 

Slideshows have been a bit of a pain point for me, I’m a visual learner and being completely honest have always struggled to read the written word and feel inspired. Anyone who doubts this should see my collection of books as opposed to my collection of films!

Quite often slides are a go to for businesses in meetings, whether that be internal or external meetings. Particularly for conferences and   indeed pitches. However, like myself it isn’t always a designer that puts slides together, hopefully these slides and indeed all my slides show that with a little effort you can create something a little more standout without having to be a designer.

There are numerous articles on the differences between slides and documents, but in my view there are occasions when you need both a great slide to represent a visual idea, but also the written context of the idea too. There isn’t always the opportunity to create both pieces of content.

How to format PowerPoint slides

My follow up presentation to how to create great slides, involved going through some of the tools in PowerPoint and how to use them when formatting slide decks. It hopefully illustrates some of the built in tools that PowerPoint has that people either aren’t aware of or don’t know how to use.

There were lots of tweets and comments on the ‘how to create slides deck’ but for all that it shows a number of good ways of approaching a slide deck, I felt that it missed the actual how I created these slides, lined up these titles etc. So as a follow up I produced these:

Has it worked?

In short, yes. My Slideshare profile URL now ranks 3rd for my own name and it’s opened up a community of people to me that previously I didn’t have access to or who weren’t interested in.

Total views from my presentations on Slideshare went from 195 at the end of December:

Slideshare stats October - December 2012 - Mike Jeffs

 

 

To over 123,898 views currently.

Slideshare stats January - March 2013 - Mike Jeffs

The process I’ve used

I admit, I was more successful with the first deck embedded in this post. With how to format slides using PowerPoint I was less strict in interacting with people, however the good thing about content is that it can always be changed, tweaked, updated and altered to be more fit for purpose or meet another purpose. This could be video, slides, blog posts, imagery, there is always a potential follow up story. This blog post is simply an extension of my slides and hopefully it’s a useful one!

Great Content Cycle - Mike Jeffs

You can read a little more about my Great content Cycle in my B3 post on How I got 85,000 views in a week on Slideshare.

The header image is by wlodi via creative commons.

Mike Jeffs

Author Mike Jeffs

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