SEO Werkt!

Does your business have a blog? Would you like your blog to bring in more leads for your business? You already know you need to create awesome blog content, but there’s more to business blogging than just that. You also need to include a few tactics to help you bring in the leads you want. [...]

Apple v. Samsung presiding Judge Lucy Koh on Sunday ordered Apple and Samsung’s lead attorneys to meet and hash out final jury instructions, a point of contention since the trial began two weeks ago.

Creating slide decks is a regular practice for many marketers. And whether those presentations are meant for industry speaking gigs or educational webinars, all those slides can have some great traffic and lead gen potential beyond their originally intended use. In fact, one of the most powerful marketing platforms for visual content is the versatile presentation platform, SlideShare, and it’s a great platform for getting even more out of your slide presentations.

Unfortunately, not many brands are using SlideShare to its fullest potential, and as a result, they aren’t generating the results many marketing experts promise. So today, we’re going to patch up all those holes in your SlideShare strategy with 7 easy tips to ensure that your slideshow content is primed to generate more traffic and conversions. Let’s get started!

1) Treat Title Slides Like Video Thumbnails

There is something that all the top presentations on SlideShare have in common: The title slide is incredibly eye-catching. Take this presentation, which has been viewed over 700,000 times:

Your presentation has the potential of getting featured on the SlideShare homepage, and your title slide is the first thing SlideShare users will see if it does, so you want to maximize its potential for garnering lots of clicks. And you’ll never get clicks if that first slide doesn’t capture visitors’ attention, so be sure to treat your title slide like you would an enticing video thumbnail on YouTube. Use bold colors, compelling images, and a catchy, and a descriptive presentation title. Just make sure your content is awesome enough to back up the hype.

2) Leverage Guest Blogging to Get Early Exposure

As I hinted in tip 1, hitting the homepage of SlideShare should be a goal, as it can really generate some massive views for your presentations. The thing is, it’s easier to get featured if your new presentation picks up views early on. So if you don’t have a large audience to reach via your own blog, be sure to also leverage the power of guest blogging to generate more clicks and shares of your slideshows right off the bat. While this strategy works for all of your past SlideShare presentations as well, from my experience, building buzz for a new presentation is the best way to get it on the homepage. You should also remember that you can embed your slideshows (like you can with a video), and have a single presentation featured on multiple sites. This will increase your chances of generating more views and shares, which will thus boost your chances of getting featured on SlideShare’s homepage.

3) Use Presentations as Teasers/Previews for the Full Content

Anyone who is familiar with SlideShare will tell you to include a final slide featuring a call-to-action for lead generation. But an even better method is to leverage a call for more content. As an example, you can take a large ebook (like we did with our “75 Customer Service Facts, Quotes & Statistics“) and create a slideshow that showcases just a sampling of the content — not the whole book.

This tends to work even better than a generic call-to-action for additional content, because viewers are already primed to check out more of the content they were just viewing. And if you created a high quality and remarkable slideshow, many users will be more than happy to complete a form to download your gated content. Just be sure to make the call-to-action clickable in your actual presentation; it’s essential for lead generation, especially when your slideshow gets embedded on another site. And don’t skimp on the preview slideshow: not only should your downloadable content be meaty, but your slideshow content also needs to put its best foot forward and include enough compelling material to make the click-though worthwhile for your visitors.

4) Remember SEO

Another important thing to consider is, when you’re uploading a slideshow to SlideShare, you have the power of the SideShare domain at your disposal. One of my earlier presentations, for example, still ranks first in Google for terms like “content marketing on SlideShare.” If you’re a regular reader of HubSpot’s blog, you may recall that in a past article discussing SEO for YouTube, the title, description, tags, links, and comments have an impact on how your video ranks in search results. You also likely know that it’s often easier to rank with YouTube videos due to the strong domain. All of the above is true for SlideShare as well; despite having a less authoritative domain than YouTube, SlideShare presentations still carry some serious weight in search results, so you should be targeting the keywords you want to get found for in search in the slideshows you upload.

5) Understand Who Comprises SlideShare’s Audience

One reason SlideShare is so useful for inbound marketing is that it’s made up of a very professional audience. As you can see here, its audience is (percentage wise) made up of more professionals than even LinkedIn (see slide 3):

Unlike the fair-weather visitors you might get from Twitter or Facebook, most SlideShare users are there to either improve themselves professionally or find business-related content. This is also a good indicator for the types of content that performs well on SlideShare.

6) Don’t Be Afraid to Get Detailed

In an article highlighting some interesting data about how slide count contributes to SlideShare success, HubSpot Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella exposed data indicating that longer slideshows perform better than shorter presentations. In fact, he reports that presentations with 60+ slides or longer generate the most views. We can only speculate about why this is true, but it may be owed to the fact that SlideShare is a site mostly used by professionals who are likely seeking data-focused, meaty presentations with a lot of depth. Don’t be afraid to get detailed in your SlideShare content, and load your presentations with lots of data. Unlike YouTube, where shorter content tends to be more successful, SlideShare users welcome comprehensive content.

7) Design Beautiful Presentations

Remember, SlideShare is a visual platform. Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that presentations that are well designed and feature poignant, powerful images are going to perform the best. It’s not only important that the information you’re presenting be interesting; the quality of your slideshow’s visuals needs to also match the quality of the information presented.

Here are a view things that jump out about beautifully designed — and popular — SlideShare presentations:

• Strong, bold colors and large text to capture users’ attentions and make the content easy to follow along
• Topic-specific presentations that cover one particular topic in intensive detail with plenty of data
• Visuals that play a major role in the presentation, such as charts, graphs, images, and graphics

Simply following modern design best practices will put you heads and shoulders above much of the content uploaded to SlideShare.

How are your presentations performing on SlideShare? Have you made it onto the SlideShare homepage yet?

This is a guest post written by Gregory Ciotti. Greg is the content strategist for HelpScout, a customer service app that makes email support a breeze for you and your customers. Get more from Greg on the HelpScout blog or on his website, Sparring Mind.

Chrome, Google’s speedy web browser, eclipsed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in its global market share back in May and is now leading by a significant margin of nearly 2 percent.

StatCounter, a site that (you guessed it!) tallies statistics around web browsers and websites, showed Chrome sliding past IE by a very slim margin a few months ago. Between May 14 and May 20, Chrome was ahead of Internet Explorer for the first time in its brief history (the browser launched publicly September 2008).

At that time, StatCounter showed Chrome having a lead of just three tenths of a percent. Today, Chrome claims 33.81 percent to IE’s 32.04 percent. The situation has changed quite a bit since this time last year, when IE had 42.45 percent of the global browser market and Chrome claimed a mere 22.14 percent.

The stats service moreover showed Chrome passing Firefox in popularity at the end of last year, when it claimed a 25.7 percent share of the global browser market to Firefox’s 25.2 percent share.

Still, StatCounter is just one resource for browser-tracking. Another source is NetMarketShare, which showed that after months of steady losses, Internet Explorer did experience some staunching of the bleeding around the release of IE9, a more modern and competitive browser, and during Microsoft’s concerted campaign to rid people’s PCs of the oft-maligned IE6.

“IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away,” wrote Roger Capriotti, Director of Internet Explorer Marketing, at the beginning of the year.

“This is an important step in helping to move the Web forward,” wrote Internet Explorer Senior Director Ryan Gavin at the end of last year. “The Web overall is better — and safer — when more people run the most up-to-date browser.”

But overall, the trends as analyzed by StatCounter don’t favor IE for the long haul. Here’s a chart showing where the major browsers stand and how we got here:

Top image courtesy of mikeledray, Shutterstock

Filed under: VentureBeat

Over a year after resigning from his post at Intel, Anand Chandrasekher has reappeared, this time at Qualcomm.

The 24-year Intel veteran will  join the telecommunications chip giant as its chief marketing officer.

Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkop said in a statement that Chandrasekher’s marketing and management experience made him an ideal candidate for the post, which will have him leading Qualcomm’s marketing and external communications.

Chandrasekher is no novice to marketing. In his final act at Intel, he was the primary face of Intel’s Atom processor, which the company hoped would increase its stake in the smartphone market. Chandrasekher resigned as head of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group last March, prompting speculation that the division wasn’t doing as well as Intel had liked.

Prior to that, Chandrasekher led Intel’s efforts with the Centrino Wi-Fi adapters, which were aimed at netbooks and laptops.

Unlike his final job at Intel, Chandrasekher’s new gig at Qualcomm will have him overseeing an operation that already has a major presence in the smartphone market, so it will be interesting to see how his marketing chops fare in the new position.

Photo: Qualcomm

Filed under: mobile

Nokia is expected to be the first company to show off Windows Phone 8 devices, and now it looks like that could happen as soon as September 5, sources tell Bloomberg.

That’s when Nokia’s annual Nokia World conference begins in Helsinki, Finland, and it’s also a week before the expected iPhone 5 unveiling on September 12.

If the news is true, Nokia is likely trying to preempt the media storm around the next iPhone. But given the general media insanity leading up to a new iPhone announcement, Nokia likely needs more than a week of lead time to truly make consumers excited about its new devices. And given Nokia’s history with the Lumia line, it’s new phones probably wouldn’t be available for several weeks after its unveiling — long after the iPhone 5′s expected September 21st release.

Microsoft announced at its Windows Phone developer summit last month that existing Windows Phone devices won’t be upgraded to Windows Phone 8, including Nokia’s flagship Lumia 900. Microsoft will instead be offering a “Windows Phone 7.8″ upgrade that will bring many of the visual refinements in WP8 to older devices. Given that the Lumia 900 only hit U.S. stores in April, the decision not to upgrade it could have affected its sales over the summer.

Nokia shipped 4 million Lumia phones in the second quarter, but we don’t yet know how the platform has fared in recent months. Bloomberg points to lack of consumer awareness as one reason for the Lumia’s slow sales in America. Even though AT&T said that it would be promoting the Lumia 900 heavily when it launched, one potential buyer noted that the phone wasn’t on display at one AT&T store, and the sales associate never mentioned the phone as an option.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Apple’s ongoing patent war with rival Samsung continues to yield troves of information on one of the world’s most secretive companies, with testimony from a former design lead revealing that costs prevented Apple from launching its first iPhone design with contoured screens while concerns over consumer comfort put the dagger in plans for an iPhone mini.

Every four years, the world’s best athletes show off their strength, speed, and stamina as they compete for the gold medal in the Summer Olympic Games. Little do they know that people like us are counting their tweets, retweets, and followers in an unofficial competition we like to call the Social Media Olympics. Who’s in the lead? We’ve got two infographics to help you decide.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Intel and Toshiba are going social with ‘The Beauty Inside,’ Hollywood’s first film that gives fans the opportunity to play the lead role.  The episodic film, which is set to premiere on August 16 on Facebook, tells the story of Alex, a guy who wakes up every day as a different person, and Facebookers are invited to audition to play the many different versions of Alex, who star alongside Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Topher Grace.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.