When you join a service that allows you to post content like YouTube or SlideShare, they send you weekly e-mails with statistics, including how many views. Mostly you probably ignore these, but sometimes they can make you fall off your chair. That happened to me twice recently with SlideShare, a content sharing site for presentations.

I initially found SlideShare through LinkedIn because it was an application that you could use to attach presentations to your LinkedIn profile. As someone who is looking to boost my “expert” status and hoping to be seen as a thought leader, it made sense to me to post my presentations after I gave them. I hoped someone would see them and want to book me to speak.

LinkedIn and SlideShare have subsequently parted ways but I got into the habit of posting my presentations so I could direct people to them after. Recently I did a presentation at OfficeSlice, a coworking space in Los Angeles, for a small group of entrepreneurs. The talk was called Productivity: The Secret Sauce and I had 113 views the first week it was posted on SlideShare! I thought that was kind of amazing – and it was the first time I fell off my chair. I shared that stat with several colleagues and they were quite surprised too.

The second time was today when I happened to glance at the weekly stats and I saw that my Re Launch You Liftoff After Layoff talk now had 547 views. That talk has been up for a while, but I have to say that I am getting a heck of a lot more views of my thought leadership on SlideShare than I ever have on YouTube. (And yes, I do know that it is the No. 2 search engine and you have to post there anyway.)

The next question you are asking is, “So, have you gotten any clients from this?” My answer is no clients but several speaking gigs. Organizers like that I have talks prepared and that they can quickly flip through the content to see if it is a fit for their audience.

But here is some advice if you want to make this work well for you: Take time to format your deck for consistent look and feel, including font sizes, colors, pictures – looks matter! Also, make sure you proofread carefully. Think of your deck as your storefront and people will judge the window displays.

I look at SlideShare as just another marketing platform. I am not creating content specifically for it, rather repurposing and sharing something I have already created. And I use the free version. Seems like a win win all around.

I would love to hear what you think of this strategy and if you do this (or something like it). Please leave a comment below so we can all learn from you.