10 Quick Tips for Your Company Video

Tom Hapgood’s animation class is working on a 15 second video project for local startup myDealCompass. Since many of the students plan to work in advertising when they finish school, this project gives them some real-world experience with thinking about an advertising message, working with a client, and dealing with constraints that are part of the normal workflow in real live commercial video.

When your company plans a video, you also have to think about your advertising message, working with all the people involved, and dealing with constraints.

Let me share some things I noticed at today’s shoot. We were shooting a trio of actors against a green screen for the artists to use in their animated shorts. The actors had their scripts, the artists had their storyboards, Tom had his camera, and the footage turned out well.

1. Be prepared. Having scripts, actors who had rehearsed ahead of time, and storyboards made all the difference.
2. When working with a green screen, remind your on-air talent not to wear green. The green screen isn’t invisible. It just provides a single color background that can easily be removed. If your earrings happen to match the green screen, you’ll just have holes in your ears.
3. Have three good sources of light, one at each side and one above and slightly behind the subject.
4. Remember that it gets hot under the lights. We saw a client’s video the other day that had blindingly shiny reflections off the speaker’s forehead, so I brought some rice paper sheets and powder. Water is also a good idea.
5. Give people time to get comfortable. Unless they’re professional actors, they’ll need a little time to get themselves settled. Your cameraman will need a little time to get the lighting right, too. Combine those two things.
6. Some people never get comfortable in front of the camera. Don’t have those people do your video, regardless of the position they hold in your company. We auditioned and chose volunteers who were able to relax and look good on camera.
7. Leave the camera rolling and have your actors repeat their lines several times, possibly with different emphasis on the words. Then you can pick the best take.
8. Direct your actors. Very specific instruction such as “Look at me” and “Emphasize the word ‘grow’” work well. Tom also asked our actors to “Bring the enthusiasm up a notch”  several times so the artists could decide in production just how excited the actors should be about the product. As you know if you’ve watched commercials, the level of ecstasy evinced in commercials is often a bit more than would come naturally in daily life.
9. If you have props, plan how the actors should hold them and what movements they should make. If the cell phone is important, as it was in this shot, be clear about where it needs to be in the shot and how much it ought to move.
10. Plan for the sound. That might mean microphones for the actors, in which case they need to have a lapel, collar, or waistband to put them on. The microphone on the camera might work, too, in a quiet space, but be aware of wind. Outdoor settings may seem very quiet, but the movement of air past the microphone ends up sounding noisy.

Professional video continues to be a serious investment, even in these days of flip cameras and camera phones.  If you’re doing your own company video with a hired cameraman, make the same efforts that professionals do, and you’ll be happier with your results.

Do you have some tips to share? Add them in the comments!

SEM, SEO, or Both?

SEM, or search engine marketing, is different from SEO, or search engine optimization.

For one thing, there is fairly broad agreement on what “SEO” means. Optimization, or making something the best it can be, for search engines, so making your website the best it can be at showing up when people search for things relevant to your business. This is about good content at your website, a high level of usability — stuff like that. It’s also about getting links to your website. Good quality links require good content, too, as well as regular linkbuilding, so linkbuilding is generally considered part of SEO.

SEM, on the other hand, may be anything that improves marketing using search engines. While some people define SEM as only paid search tools such as Adwords, others (include Wikipedia) would include SEO under the larger umbrella of SEM. I’d be inclined to say that important steps like printing your web address on your receipts or invoices qualify as SEM but not as SEO. Such a step can lead people to search for you no matter what your site is like once they get there (though it had better be good to bring them back).

The question is, can you manage with just one or the other?

Our experience with FreshPlans, our lab site, tells us that we can succeed with a site using only SEO. With nothing but a highly optimized website, we increased traffic to the site by 3,000% in  a year. So yes, the answer might be that you can indeed make do with just SEO.

The next question is, are we talking about your lab site?

If your website sends business to your shop (or you want it to), you shouldn’t be experimenting to see how far you can get with just one approach when you could be doing more.  Diverting traditional advertising dollars to paid search, advertising your website in traditional media, sending customers to your site, using social media to increase visibility — all of these are effective strategies for most companies.

So can you use just SEM? We’ve met people who use only paid search and ignore the quality of their site. We don’t get it. SEO is cheaper, more effective, and lasts longer than PPC, so why would you bypass it?

If you’re trying to decide between SEO and SEM, you’re asking yourself the wrong question.

Writing Your Website’s Banners

Most of the sites we work on these days have banners — sliders, rotators, whatever you like to call them. Many sites add them in and many site owners like to write themselves new ones from time to time — sometimes every week.

Chances are, if you have one of these, you do some of the writing for it yourself. Let me give you some suggestions.

First, find out whether your banners are being read by the search engines or not. The one above, from the new site Selling to the Masses, which we worked on with Sharp Hue, is a picture. Search engines can’t read the text. This banner says, “We’ll help you get your product on the shelf,” a phrase for which no one searches.

It doesn’t matter. If your banner is a picture, it can say whatever you like and it will have no effect on search. The banner below is another example. Whatever you’d be searching for if you typed “The word is on the streets” into your favorite search engine, it sure wouldn’t be a hospital.

It doesn’t matter. The search engines don’t know what words are on these images, so they’re not confused.It’s the same as the banner below, from the new website we’ve just built with Tom Hapgood for The Skyridge Pavilion. This rotator has photographs only, and no words. From the point of view of the search engines, it’s the same. Just make sure you have useful alt text.

What if your banners are text and readable by search engines?  Then they ought to provide information about your website to search engines as well as to humans.

In this banner for a software company, we’ve put multiple keywords and clear statements of what the company does. Terms like “CRM implementation” and “call center solutions” make it clear to a search engine what’s going on here, where “Word is on the streets” would not.

Whether you need to clue in search engines or not, your banner’s words need to communicate effectively to human visitors. In the site below, which we built for an industrial manufacturer’s representative, we’ve used the banners to list the company’s strongest selling points.

The owners of the  e-commerce site below came up with a headline for their banner which is clever and which also communicates their special offer (a coupon) immediately.

Your banner may have just a few words or it may have several sentences. It may be the only thing your visitors see before they click away from your site, or it may be all they need to see before they buy.

They can also entice return customers with temporary or featured messages. The banner below, for a site we’re working on with TAGG Studios, should be changed about as often as good customers come back to the site, so it offers something new each time they visit.

This will keep customers coming back — and shopping.

Put as much thought into the content of your banner as you do into the content of your website overall. You’ll be glad you did.

Is Social Media Only for the Pure in Heart?

An interesting discussion has been going on at Pinterest, one which has, I think, implications for any discussion of social media and business.

The facts of the case are fairly simple. Inbound marketing software company Hubspot made a board of their own e-books, pinning them quite simply with no ad copy and a simple URL leading visitors back to them. They are free ebooks, and I for one always enjoy them.

Someone came along and commented “Stop advertising!” and another said, “STOP!” At that point a discussion broke out, and you can read it (and get the info about the e-book, too) at Pinterest.

Pinterest bans self-promotion, but not business pages. Shonagh Woods gives a nice summary of their stated position: “Pinterest’s Etiquette statement is understandably ambiguous, after all that. Whilst it does say ‘Avoid Self-Promotion’ it does not state that you absolutely cannot ‘Self-Promote’. It also states that ‘If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away!’ – so again, you can pin your own work if so desired, and you think people might like it. But they do add the caveat: ‘try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.’ With the operative words being ‘try’ and ‘purely’.”

You can’t announce your sale on Pinterest, then, the way you can at Twitter. Otherwise, it’s the same as any social media marketing issue; I’ve written about the overall issue in “Why People Hate/Love Social Media Marketing,” and I think the same points still apply. You can’t treat social media like advertising and expect it to work well for you.

Pinterest is different in some ways, though. For one thing, it’s supposed to be pretty. I kind of feel like the ebook in the illustration I (okay, slightly sarcastically) put together for this post would be fine at Pinterest, where Hubspot’s gray, no-frills ebook drew the eyes of the local vigilantes. In fact, the ebook in my illustration (without the sarcastic composite) has been pinned and repinned multiple times at Pinterest by various people and nobody seems to mind.

I see clothes, food, household goods, craft supplies, and all manner of consumer goods being pinned at Pinterest by individuals and by companies which doubtless hope to gain some commercial benefits, and I’ve never seen an objection before. The frilly pink and gold luminosity of most of those pictures is probably not a coincidence.

In social media, fitting in and being one of the group is always a good tactic.

Another thing about Pinterest is that it really isn’t all that social. When someone at Forbes said that Pinterest was winning over Facebook in the retail traffic space because “… if your business is selling stuff, a social network of stuff beats a social network of people.”

There are some discussions there, and there are some people who follow their IRL friends and squeal, “That would look so cute on you!” but people mostly aren’t making friends at Pinterest. One of the main reasons for making boards at Pinterest is to keep all the bookmarks for the party you’re planning in one place so you can find them later, something you could really never accomplish with Twitter or Facebook. People follow one another with no further interaction most of the time. In that situation, and with complete freedom to follow and unfollow people at will, it’s hard to see how what I pin on my board is another pinner’s business any more than what I put on my wall at home is my neighbor’s business.

Pinterest is a great place to share stuff, but it costs someone money to run it. Our local coffee shops are also great places to share, but we accept that we have to buy some coffee sometimes so they can keep their doors open. Pinners probably ought to recognize that someone has to foot the bill; on the internet, that generally means some form of advertising, however subtle and well photographed it may be.

My takeaway from this, on behalf of those of our social media clients for whom we manage Pinterest accounts, is to be careful to fit in. Two objections to a pin mean nothing in the scheme of things, so I don’t think we can take much from it, but I’d be interested in your opinion. You can write in the comments below, email me, or join in at Pinterest at the link above,with or without flowers.

The Like Economy

The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook by Brian Carter is just exactly what it sounds like it is: a book on how to make promote your company on Facebook.

Facebook is a bit of a quandary for businesses. Facebook gives you theoretical access to one of the largest potential audiences in the world, since there are over 800 million users. You have to be there, because your customers will look for you. Facebook can send traffic — twice or thrice as much, according to Carter, as Twitter. Advertising at Facebook is cheaper than most other online advertising options.

Carter also makes an interesting point about Facebook: it’s skewed toward positivity. You can “Like” but not “Dislike” posts, and positive posts get more likes so they draw more attention. People are very enthusiastic at Facebook and go around expressing their love for things with a wanton perkiness that you just don’t see in the physical world.

On the other hand, we haven’t seen much actual success at Facebook. A few of the examples of Facebook use I’ve personally seen among clients:

• A company spending thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, getting lots of fans, and selling nothing because the fans were, for the most part, high school students and not the target audience.
• A company interacting well with Facebook and getting lots of expressions of love and pretty good traffic, but one of their lowest conversion rates.
• A company engaging visitors well at Facebook and getting twice the traffic as from Twitter — but also twice the bounce rate and half the pages per visit.

Carter points out — as I have, and probably everyone else who writes about this subject — that you may be getting people’s attention on Facebook and then having them come to your site via search or direct traffic, so you simply can’t measure the effect of your company’s Facebook page.

But he also suggests that companies that don’t do well from Facebook are probably doing it wrong. Some of the things Carter says you need to do to succeed with Facebook:

• Advertise. Carter is pretty clear that Facebook for business isn’t free. You should plan to advertise to gain fans, he says, before you can expect to do anything else.
• Target your ads and all your content well. Carter points out that you aren’t a good example of your target customer (“If you have power in a company,” he says, “you are, by definition, strange. And I mean that in the very best way.”). You should therefore quit thinking that you are the person you’re writing for. Find out about your actual customers and aim your marketing toward them.
• Test and analyze your data.While Carter discusses at length the factors that keep Facebook from being 100% measurable, he also has a lot of good advice about testing and tweaking your efforts. If you don’t test and track, after all, you don’t know how you’re doing.

There are many sections of the book that cover things marketers may already know (AIDA, for example), but there are also some Facebook-specific tips that were new to me. Here’s my favorite: make your ad’s call to action be a phone call to you so you get all those free impressions and few paid-for clicks.

I’m not convinced that Facebook is going to be a marketing powerhouse for most companies. As a recent Forbes article comparing Pinterest’s track record with Facebook’s said, “Pinterest shows that if your business is selling stuff, a social network of stuff beats a social network of people.” We have a Facebook page for our company, but we know that people don’t decide they need to improve their web presence and mosey over to Facebook to look for an expert.

We do have one client who’s very successful at Facebook. They’re in entertainment, they have close to 14,000 fans, they greet visitors with pictures of scantily-clad women and — while they don’t advertise on Facebook — they do pay people to spend hours inviting friends to their events. People do go to Facebook to see what’s going on that night, they enjoy social invitations from friends, and this company’s target demographic probably also looks at pictures of girls for fun.

When I went to Facebook to check their numbers, I saw that a friend of mine had sent me an “invitation” that had something to do with a grocery store. While I wouldn’t normally click on this, I did for the sake of this post. I find that people who invite 50 friends will get a $100 voucher from the store. In other words, my friend was paid $2.00 to pester me with an ad. Seems pretty typical for Facebook business promotion.

Basically, people are playing when they go to Facebook. They’re not doing chores, shopping, or thinking about business. They might like an invitation to a concert, but they don’t want an “invitation” to a grocery store.

If your business is suited to Facebook, though, and you’re willing to  pay for ads as your first step, Carter’s book gives you a lot of very practical advice. It’s an enjoyable read and addresses a lot of things our clients wonder about, such as the value of contests and of welcome tabs. It also contains plenty of wise words on social media and marketing in general. If you want to explore Facebook marketing, this book is a good choice.

Integrating Online Marketing Efforts

We offer a variety of online content services, and that’s probably a mistake.

Strong, optimized web content increases traffic and conversion. Regularly updating your web content improves search results and the ROI of your website.

Companies with blogs get at least 50% more leads than those that don’t have blogs — more if they have regularly posted blogs over a long time.

Companies with effective social media increase sales and/or reduce marketing costs. They reach potential customers through channels consumers trust.

Analytics allows you to measure the results of your efforts, to learn more about your visitors, and to monitor and to respond to your traffic.

Linkbuilding increases traffic, improves search results, and extends the value of your website.

So we offer web content, blogging, social media management, analytics, and linkbuilding.

But look what happens if you put them together.

Social media mentions drive more traffic to your blog. Linkbuilding does the same. Blog readers mention you in their social media — if you’re there, you can engage with them. Joining conversations in your field — a method of linkbuilding — increases your authority, improving the value of your social media efforts and the visibility of your blog. Blogging extends conversations elsewhere on the web, driving traffic to your website and giving you more to link to with your social media. It also increases the number of indexed pages at your website, increasing the value of your site and improving your search rankings — while giving you more linkbait. Analytics lets you see how each element affects your traffic, leads, and conversions and how they work together, alerting you to opportunities which you can then leverage with blogging, social media, linkbuilding, new website content, or a combination of strategies.

Each element of your online presence improves the effectiveness of each of the other elements, so that a good website with integrated social media is more valuable than either a good website or effective social media on its own. Add linkbuilding, analytics, and blogging, and you have a system with value greater than the sum of its parts.

We’ll continue to offer all these elements: we know that people want to be able to choose one from column two and two from column three. But we sure like to see the powerhouse effect that all the pieces have when they’re brought together.

 

Balanced Web Traffic

The image at left, from the analytics report of our lab site, probably looks pretty familiar to you if you use Google Analytics at all. This pie chart shows the most general information about your traffic sources: the percentage of your visitors finding you via search, referral, and direct traffic.

All things being equal, we like to see even numbers, or about one third each from these major sources of traffic. A fourth source, campaigns (yellow) should show up if you do email campaigns; this site doesn’t, so the lack of yellow in the pie chart doesn’t mean the campaigns are ineffective.

Our lab site is where we try out things for search, so it has always had a very high proportion of search traffic. There are dangers in this kind of profile, though:

• A change in the search algorithms can lose you a lot of your traffic. In October, this site lost all Google traffic for the term “lesson plans,” which is the subject of the web site. Our traffic fell by half instantly. It’s our lab site, so it was merely another interesting experiment, but for a business, this could be a terrible thing.
• At the very least, a profile like this shows lost opportunities. We’ve had fewer than 1,000 direct visits. If we increased that number by networking, advertising in the physical world, or increasing our online visibility to increase brand awareness, we could increase the number of direct visits. This wouldn’t decrease the number of visitors who arrived via search, so why not do it? Ditto for referrals and campaigns — with no traffic from campaigns and only 11% from referred traffic, this site could definitely grow if linkbuilding and email marketing were added to the mix.

When you see a pie chart like this one, you’re seeing more than half of your traffic coming directly to your website. This can mean a couple of different things. First, it can mean that you are so well known and have such a great URL that lots of people go to your site directly.

If your pie chart looks like this, ask yourself how much you resemble Amazon.com. Have you invested as much as they did in radio ads in order to get your site off the ground? Is your name as much a household word, at least among your potential customers, and is your web address as obvious?

If not, chances are good that a very high proportion of direct visitors is caused by your failure to filter out your workers or yourself. Your staff may pull up the website to show things to customers (they certainly should), you may visit your site as part of your morning ritual, or your web workers may go to post your blog or to get information for linkbuilding or social media. Filter them out of your analytics for accuracy.

If you’ve filtered everyone out and your site is not similar to Amazon.com, then a preponderance of direct traffic can mean that you have a small number of very faithful visitors. Check under Audience>Behavior and see if you have less than 80% new visitors. Linkbuilding and social media can help you extend your reach.

A pie chart like this shows an unusually high proportion of referral traffic. This can happen when you have links from a very influential site or a bit of linkbait goes viral. We’ve also seen this when we’ve set up on offsite blog to send traffic to a site. The problem with this is that it’s usually not sustainable. You’re relying on someone else to send you traffic, and when that source dries up, your traffic dries up with it. If you have a profile like this and you know it’s a temporary thing (big traffic from StumbleUpon, for example), that’s okay. If this represents your usual traffic pattern, though, it suggests that you work on optimizing your site for search.

This pattern can also show heavy reliance on social media. In that case, ask yourself how sustainable that reliance is. Do you have staff members or web pros putting in significant paid time, or are you spending every free minute doing it yourself? If it’s the latter, ask yourself if you can keep that up. Is your other work that expendable, or your life outside of work that uneventful? Will it continue to be so in the future?

Social media is great — just be sure you’ve budgeted for it if you plan to rely on it for your marketing. There’s a widespread belief that social media marketing is free, but that’s only true if you don’t count the time involved.

Here’s a site that has fairly even amounts of direct (orange) traffic and referral (green) traffic, but comparatively little search. This usually means that your site needs to be optimized better for search. It can mean that you’re doing a great job of social media and offline advertising. However, search is the most automatic source of traffic, and therefore is likely to be the cheapest. Improving your search results when you have a profile like this can be an investment with excellent ROI.

This is a fairly balanced profile, and the two examples you see are just a couple of examples of this kind of look from our collection. Most of the sites we work with have search as the #1 source of traffic, and these show balance among the other traffic sources or a bit less for campaigns since they may be the costliest option. Organic search is the “set it and forget it” of traffic sources, and typically the one with the least cost once you have a good site built. As long as you’re seeing steady increases in traffic from other sources as well, it’s probably okay to have a bit more than half.

Check your pie chart and see where you have opportunities for expansion that you’re not exploring yet.

 

SEO Tip #31: Internal Search

Writing About Yourself Online

I’ve spent a lot of this week writing about people online — not about myself, but the kinds of things you might write about yourself. I’m happy to share some suggestions, in case you don’t have anyone to do it for you.

Treat your profile or About Us page like an article.

That is to say, you should have a main point to make and organize your data in support of that main point. I had the opportunity to redo a LinkedIn profile for a favorite client. I was able to brag on him without sounding like bragging because I just marshaled the facts into a readable and persuasive document.

This requires deciding on the main point you want to make and narrowing your focus. Use bullet points and bold letters to draw attention to the facts that support your thesis: “Ken sells 95+% of the homes he lists, while the metro average is 66%” is not a boast; it’s a fact.

Grouping those facts by topic (service awards here, sales figures there) makes your point more clearly than a long list.

Consider appropriateness.

I’ve been working with another favorite client on a website for a new branch of their business. Over the years, I’ve written all kinds of stuff for these guys, and I know what their clients love about them: huge parties, cool events, the best places to see and be seen. Their site receives millions of views every year, either because of my compelling content or because of the numerous pictures of half-clad women. I started out their About Us page with their usual USP, assuring everyone that they have been “rockin’ Chicago with great parties, hot ladies, and the best music…”

However, this new business is a limousine service. The very things that make these guys so popular in their other businesses cause their potential new customers and partners to think about paparazzi, car crashes, and vomit stains. Not the right mood at all. I corrected it.

When you write about yourself, you have to think about the intended audience and how you want them to see you. You may have different sides of your personality to show at different times, and that’s okay.

Match the medium.

My third example is yet another favorite client (yes, I do have a lot of favorite clients), who had a nearly naked page over at Spoke. You might have one over there, too — there are a lot of naked pages over there.

At LinkedIn, you can be a bit sales-oriented, on your About Us page you can do unabashed announcements of how great you are if that’s your style, but info pages need a neutral, unbiased “just the facts” approach. Spoke is okay with a bit of sass, but Wikipedia absolutely is not. These differences mean that you have to look around a bit and analyze the situation both to conform to the rules so your entry isn’t flagged, and also to make best use of the medium.

Can you add a video? Do so. Are links allowed? Make best use of the them. Can you import your RSS feed? Go for it. You won’t know what extra options you have if you don’t make the effort to find out.

If it’s hard for you to write about yourself — it is for a lot of people — I’ll be happy to do it for you. Contact us and we’ll take care of it.

Are Hub Pages Still Good for Your Website?

In the heyday of article marketing, when a genuinely good article at EzineArticles could do wonders for a website, sites like Squidoo, HubPages, and Helium were often used for offsite optimization of websites. Making a Squidoo lens about your company, for example, allowed you to introduce yourself to potential customers via squidoo.com, a domain which is almost certainly more powerful than that of your small business, while also linking to your website as an authoritative source. In fact, we ‘d create high quality content on relevant topics at a company’s website specifically in order to link to it from a high quality Squidoo lens, and often ended up with multiple links from other sources to both the pages. It worked well.

Unfortunately, it worked well enough that the web became infested with poor quality and even autogenerated articles thrown together simply to game the system. Hundreds of valueless pages clotted the search results for popular topics and search engines cracked down on the practice.

Does that mean that hub pages — user generated pages including good articles and curated content — are now worthless? Not necessarily. After all, Squidoo.com still probably gets more traffic than your domain.

Here’s my advice on hub pages:

• Make sure you have plenty of good content on your own site first. If you don’t have authority pages, a blog, whitepapers, or some other excellent stuff to read at your own website, don’t spend your time building other sites.
• Use hub pages as a linkbuilding tool. That is, treat the opportunity to drop a link into a good hub page or lens just as you would any other linkbuilding opportunity: focus on the quality, the relevance, and the overall value.
• Think of a good hub site as a good directory. Squidoo says that every business should have a Squidoo lens, and  you should. You should have a Spoke page, too, and a LinkedIn page, and a page at BrownBook, and a good Google Places page. Any site that lets you share good content about your company is a good place to be. The better your page, the better it is for your company.

At Spoke, a shot from which is at the top of this post, your company may already be listed. If so, your company’s page very likely has almost nothing on it. It could have a link to your website, a video, links to your press releases, and an enticing description of your company and its offerings. Which do you think will be more beneficial for your company?

Add Slideshare to Your Social Media Arsenal?

In this month’s Success Magazine, Seth Godin answers the question, “How many social media sites should you use?” with, “No one asks how many hours you ought to spend answering the phone… Use the tools that help you achieve your purpose.”

I’m taking this as permission to tell you about yet another social media option that you might be overlooking: SlideShare. SlideShare is the largest stage for sharing presentations, as in PowerPoints and Keynotes. SlideShare had over a million visitors in 2007, and last year they topped 60,000,000,000.

SlideShare lets you upload your content, create a branded channel (with paid packages), and add links back to your website. You still own the content, and you can easily embed it in your blog, Facebook page, and so forth. So far, they sound a lot like YouTube, right?

That would be a good enough reason to use them, frankly. YouTube has enormous potential for most businesses, so what’s not to like about a service that works much the same way? It gets better.

At YouTube, the average viewer is a young person whiling away free time with videos of battles between cats, old TV episodes, or tutorials on eye make up. At SlideShare, the average viewer is a business decision maker. Depending on your business, this can greatly increase your chances of conversion from viewer to serious lead.

YouTube, terrific as it is, has one major issue as a social media channel for business. While it allows you to share your own content with others, you have to make a video. Not everyone can do that, and even those who can will find that it takes more time to make good video than to make a good blog post. At SlideShare, though, you can upload all kinds of content, from videos to PDFs and Word documents. When you do a presentation, think about SlideShare as you prepare your slides and handouts and upload them afterwards. Share your infographics, brochures, whitepapers, or any other content you’ve created or paid for. In other words, you can use SlideShare to extend the reach even of content you develop for offline use.

SlideShare is also one of the social media channels that can be used sparingly without doing you any harm. An inactive Twitter or Facebook account is worse than none at all. SlideShare can be used for one or two good presentations, and still give you a beneficial link. I actually found one of mine uploaded there by someone else with no link back to me but with tweets and downloads; I hadn’t thought of uploading it there myself, and I should have.

Take an afternoon and make a solid profile at SlideShare, especially if you have appropriate content hanging around your computer. Of course, if you need help, let us know. We’ll be glad to assist.

SEO Tip #30: Data Driven Decisions

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