If you are like me, you most likely love slideshows. The beauty of slideshows is that it compels your reader to follow a sequence and read the story as you would like to describe it to them. Unlike someone reading this blog or surfing the web where often the process of grasping information is pretty random. Naturally, slideshows make a great way to talk about your company or product/service. There are various slideshow making services on the web (a long list can be found if you simply google it) but there are a few popular and very useful slideshow sharing services where you can upload your presentation and share it with the world.

Advantages:

• Increases the chances of being optimized on search engines as these slideshow sharing services allow you to tag your slideshows with relevant keywords and their pages get indexed quickly on Google (and other search engines).
• If your slideshow is really useful, it’s most likely that a user would be querying for that information on one of these popular websites, thus getting you some relevant leads/audience.
• Most of these websites will let you share your presentation on your website either by embedding it or simply sharing your link with your friends/clients/leads.
• Instead of attaching a 3-7 MB presentation to your prospective clients via e-mail, you can simply send them a link to your presentation on the web! Saves time to download, saves e-mail space (with so many attachments being sent out everyday) and most of all, is way slicker than sending a Keynote/Powerpoint via e-mail.

The 5 places:

1) Slideshare.net

In my opinion, the most important of the lot, this is the place where you can upload your presentation and present it even during a meeting or embed it on your website. The slideshow function buttons and interface is the smoothest with Slideshare compared to other presentation sharing services.

2) Linkedin

Linkedin allows you to sync your Slideshare slideshows so that it would show up on your Linkedin profile. This is very useful to get your Linkedin audience to see your presentation. Click on the images below to directly go to it (you need to be logged in to Linkedin)

3) Google Docs

Uploading a slideshow on this and publishing it allows you to share a link with anyone via e-mail/IM so they can have a look at your slideshow. Just as Slideshare you can also share this on Linkedin.

4) Docstoc

The last two on this list are actually documents/slideshows repositories which are now well optimized on search engines. You will be able to capture a large audience through Search engines on Docstoc and you would also be able to befriend people on Docstoc as a mini social networking feature of the website.

5) Scribd

Scribd has been around for years but it’s now even more slicker. Another good place to put up your presentation.

I’ve used Docstoc for quite some time now and the website only gets better. Here are some neat things you can do on the website which will help you push your brand forward to businesses/individuals:

• Share your wisdom - you write more than just a blogpost? may be an ebook, or a whitepaper on your expertise? Upload it on Docstoc
• Connect with other businesses by adding them as a friend on Docstoc
• Put up your latest company offerings on Docstoc, start off with your company profile! Here’s ours:

• Sell your premium content through “DocStore”

Bottomline no matter what your business, you can surely use Docstoc to promote your products and services either directly (with promotional docs) or indirectly (by way of promoting your expertise with a help doc).

Interesting stats about Docstoc:

• Alexa has it at position 720 globally and 477 in America which is not too bad.
• Here’s a graph comparing Docstoc with also started off well as a document-sharing website:

Hope that was one helpful tip. Another (social/professional) networking website to add to your daily dose of social media interactions! :-)

A great ad-copy at the right place (the one above was placed as a “coverpage” before the homepage of a popular stock research website) , with a creative tag-line, and good photography - that too - for a successful product can still be ignored and cause disruption to a viewer if you don’t know how to use the most appropriate formats for the final image which adheres to web standards, utilizes web safe colors and does not look pixelated - as you can see in the example!

Be smart, do a little research and make sure that your ad campaigns appear crisp and clear. Some other tips for a good ad-copy:

• Utilize high resolution photos - even if that means paying for stock photo at websites. Some recommendations: istockphoto.com, bigstockphoto.com, corbis.com
• Make sure that you hit “Save for Web” and not “Save as” to save your final ad-copies/images. There’s a reason why they have that.
• Try using “web-safe colors” in your color selection palette. It will ensure uniformity of your final image on computers with different graphic configurations

Hopefully, your copy will not look like the one above! Happy marketing!

Every so often, I come across some “free” e-books which have very less to offer because of their generic appeal. I think this book has a clear objective and provides good value for its length. Consider reading it if you are a internet start-up and it will go a long way in improving your pricing strategy.

Here’s the link to download the e-book for free here. You may also buy a physical copy on Amazon here.

After finally graduating from business school, it’s time to get down to business. Today I’m happy to introduce you to Webventurous - a new venture that will provide end-to-end web strategy solutions that are not only scalable but also fit well with your business strategy.

While I’ve provided web services in the past, Webventurous brings with it solutions which are more enterprise-centric, research-driven and fundamentally more useful to the business. In a down economy companies will find lean, efficient and business-focused websites a worthy investment.

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