What Can Slideshare Do To Promote your Online Courses
Eugene Cheng is the co-founder and the creative director of HighSpark (formerly Slide Comet), a strategic presentation consultancy serving Fortune 500 companies like Panasonic, Dentsu, Nike. Self-confessedly obsessed with presentations and loves creating compelling visual content for his agency's channel and his personal channel on SlideShare and is also a Keynote Author ( top 1% of SlideShare).
Marketing a course is hard especially if you don't already have a list. Most people try selling on FB and Twitter or pay for advertising.
Getting the word out in the market can be a difficult job, particularly if you're working with little resources and do not have the technological know-how of marketing your online courses.
If you are looking for a cost-effective way to target your customers, I strongly suggest you give SlideShare an opportunity as it has more than 70 million visitors a month with 500 per cent more business owners than other platforms such as Facebook Twitter or Linkedin.
The case for Slideshare
Over the past couple of years, I've had more than 2M visits on my official channel, as well as over 400+ monthly subscribers as a result. Now take a second to imagine what that can mean for your ability to fill up seats to your course.
High Authority
Slideshare is a reputable website (top 100+ across the world) and gets more than half of its visitors coming directly from search. The people who come to it is coming from people looking for content similar to the ones that you publish.
Visual Content
Visual content has received a crazy amount of uptake. For instance: Researchers found that color-based images increase the willingness to read the content of a website by up to 80 percentage. ( Source: Xerox )
This is precisely the reason why entrepreneurs are rethinking and rethinking the way that visually-driven content marketing will transform their company through the use of Slideshare.
What does this mean for you is a new and efficient way to create your reputation and promote your services.
Embeddable Links
Another fantastic feature is that you are able to incorporate links or strategize calls to actions within your presentations to drive traffic to or from your SlideShare.
With extensive traffic, lead generation opportunity and brand-building capabilities it's the perfect time for you to start exploring SlideShare as a marketing tool for courses.
1. Just Start Collecting Leads!
If you're familiarized with the AIDA framework in funnel marketing, it's unlikely that you'll ever make a sale right from the beginning if your customer hasn't encountered your brand or your brand before.
The concept behind the AIDA model, which is an acronym that stands for Attention-Interest-Desire-Action, is a system used by the best influencers in the industry to build their revenue funnels from scratch.
This sets up your target audience to take part in your online course.
The AIDA system runs as follows with respect to SlideShare:
- It starts by getting your target audience's attention. Your SlideShare's cover page needs to grab attention and inspire users to share it with others.
- Next, you build up the momentum or enthusiasm by getting them hooked on the subject through your SlideShare's content. Engaging them to be curious or excited about what you have to give them.
- Your audience will be moved further along in the funnel of sales, you presentation will be able to stir up desire - a link to an opt-in page on SlideShare. SlideShare.
- Driving your leads towards signing up for the offer and making it official by focusing on conversions or actions. This can mean a sale of a lower-ticket product or your course.
It's humorous how many individuals put a lot of energy in creating SlideShare content however they don't collect any information on their viewers.
Exchange emails to get things for free
SlideShare's LeadShare is meant to help you collect details of the leads you have. However, the issue is that it is expensive to purchase leads ( i.e. $8 per lead ).
Creating your own landing page using software like Leadpages or Pagewiz is an easier and more economical approach to begin collecting leads.
Incentivizing them to buy leads or other valuable stuff and subsequently moving them down your funnel, you'll have a much higher chance of selling your course than getting them into Rambo by putting "Buy my class" on the T-shirt.
Embed anywhere
Naturally, the best thing about SlideShare is that it's embeddable across a variety of sites. You own the sites and which you don't.
Think about increasing your marketing effort for your course.
2. Be Strategic with your Links
Even though viewers may not be able to be able to purchase your program right from the beginning, does not mean that you shouldn't, attempt to appeal to those who are ready to buy.
The best thing about SlideShare is that it allows you to put multiple links on the deck. So it pays to be strategic with the real estate in the pages in your SlideShare.
You can place live links beginning with 4th (4th) slide up until the last slide via software programs like Keynote or PowerPoint so that they can be clicked within the SlideShare.
The type of links that you choose to use is contingent on the goals you have set. In this case, it may be many factors that ultimately result in selling your program:
a) Links to the class or purchase
Links to your course are the most obvious and direct way to lead a viewer to your landing page and try to sell them your course. Unfortunately, they're not always eager to purchase even those who are really interested.
Make each slide irresistible and worthwhile to click. Use deep linking to guide your viewers into better information.
The videos can be embedded as an instructional video for a trial course or even a trial for free for your users to get a glimpse of what are likely to get from the course.
Offer a special discount for SlideShare customers who learn information about your class through the platform. It gives them the incentive to take action immediately instead of trying to figure out about the course if they're already geared up for purchasing the course.
B) A link to the lead magnet you have created
The first step of your funnel will to be your best shot in obtaining their information, before eventually offering your course via an email series that nurtures them and a line of lower-ticket products. This is a link that you must have.
Try to lock in the offer of your course by providing a free Download of your Slideshare presentation in pdf format this will also increase opt-ins. Also, you can make pre-orders on either an ebook or course introduction.
It is important to think of the process of marketing content as a race, not a race. It will require some time before you can see the effects. Therefore, be patient if haven't seen enough leads on the first deck.
To increase your chances, be sure to make your links to lead magnets appear obvious. Consider large buttons and images. Also, do not ask for excessive information, unless you're trying to qualify them.
The less you need to ask for, the more likely that people will be inclined to take part.
When you've gotten the email addresses of your customers, you can start shooting emails and remarket your courses or future SlideShares. You may not get to close the deal today but it doesn't mean you can't expect to get a "YES in the future.
C) Link to a sharing enabler
If your viewer isn't ready to purchase, why lose your time and effort? Allow them to share your SlideShare through a well-placed link to a website such as ClickToTweet. This way, even if they don't decide to buy the course, you'll at the very least, have a shot at their friends or colleagues.
Be strategic with where you place these, though. They are best put in slides that are quotable and have short words.
With these platforms, you get to spread your message without making a fuss. No leads are wasted with the right strategy in place.
3. Check out the course in advance
An indirect way to prime the person viewing the presentation is to incorporate material from the course that you're giving out.
Don't offer the entire forest of course, but provide them with just enough to whet their appetite to start finding out more about your company and the course you offer.
It is possible to include actual slides from the online class (assuming that you are using slides) to provide students with an idea of the kind of course you give them and further increase the credibility of your brand as a professional in your field. Being aware of what's in your course helps in reducing the mental obstacle of perceived risks before deciding to invest money in the product.
Giving your audiences a taste of what's coming will help you create hype for the upcoming event and open them to new ideas.
4. Get discovered through SEO
The majority of the SlideShare visitors come from direct search traffic. This is great news because when you make sure to optimize your SlideShare with the correct terms, you'll be able to attract a crowd that is actively searching to find the type of content you're writing and perhaps the course topic that you're putting out.
Hours of burning the midnight oil with producing content could result in only a few results if you don't manage to make your SlideShares optimized for SEO - to get it to the top page of the major search engines.
One way to avoid this the course is to select the most popular terms. However, a lot of people attempt to take on keywords that are competitive, which makes it difficult to achieve a high rank.
Opt to go for low-hanging fruits instead. Beef up your presentations by choosing keywords with moderate or high volume of traffic, and relatively low competition. You can get a lot of link juice from a high credibility site such as Slideshare.
Go through Google Keyword Planner and search for keywords with long-tail phrases that might not be a big monthly search but have a lower level of competition.
Searching for relevant terms doesn't only drive relevant traffic to your SlideShares and improve brand recognition but also makes sure that you're attracting those who are actually interested in your course offering which in turn will result in more sign-ups or sales.
What you can accomplish to boost your Slideshare presentation's visibility:
- Get your audience's attention with captivating titles that contain appropriate keywords. Your headline will appear as your main heading on results pages of search engines (SERPs) in addition to on your Slideshare presentations' URL. It is important to select appropriate keywords and an appealing headline that will grab all the interest and attention of your intended people right away.
- Create a relevant description. It's your chance to play up with terms - use salesy words but be concise. Include the appropriate keywords in order to drive visitors.
- Utilize tags. It is easy to draw organic traffic with the utilization of meta-tags. The meta-tags can be integrated up to 20 tags per presentation. Add terms that increase your presence on SlideShares internal search engine for your specific angle, and enhance the discoverability of the slides.
- Transcript. Be sure the presentation contains keywords and there is variation in content to improve the likelihood of being found.
SlideShare is a great platform that's been used by not just me, but many others to generate leads and rank in SEO, and assist you in attracting attention to your class if you're aware of how to optimize this platform for your benefit.
The distinction here is to be aware that SlideShare isn't a silver-bullet solution, but when used in conjunction with other marketing touch points, it can be a potent tool to promote your business.
If you're looking for a good starting point to better presentations offline or online We created a template based off our SlideShare which saw 20,000 visits and 300 shares across a week for you to take advantage of for no cost!