Content creation is easily one of the biggest demands any digital brand faces. In order to consistently maintain an active and engaged audience, you need content that can be shared. While the occasional share from someone else can help fill the gaps, you ultimately need your own content solutions to keep people interested. SlideShares originally took off a few years ago and remain one of the best ways to explain complex topics or ideas in an easily digestible format. If you have old blog posts, infographics or other forms of content laying about, why not convert them into a new SlideShare for additional sharing power? Today, we’ll review the basics of how to do that.

Evaluate Your Older Content

The first part of creating a SlideShare is to delve into your old content. You’ll want to give it a thorough assessment before doing anything else, pinging search engines for new info and to see if you need to update it at all/provide any additional context. Not all forms of content will be well-suited for SlideShares, but many of your more detailed and multimedia-friendly posts can easily be converted. Generally, the longer the content, the more suited it is for SlideShare: if you can only fill 2 or 3 slides with information, then it is probably not going to be a fruitful endeavor. Once you’ve selected your prime candidates, you can move on to the actual creation process.

Begin Assembling

Now that you have selected your content, you’ll want to begin creating the slides. You can do this either by using something like Microsoft Office’s Powerpoint or a free solution such as Google Slides.  It can be helpful to create a basic template for your Slideshare production that can be used for all future projects, saving you time. There are a number of slide creation tutorials on the web that can help you optimize both the design and flow of each slide or presentation; it’s definitely worth looking into, as presentation goes a long way toward convincing readers to share. Once you’ve constructed your slides and you’re confident in its look and feel, you can then move on to the final stages.

Uploading, Tweaking, Marketing

You’ll want to upload your presentation to SlideShare, which will provide you with more opportunities to customize and modify your slides. Here, you’ll begin adding links, calls to action, various images and other elements offered by the platform. SlideShare offers a lot of different features that you won’t find in PowerPoint, so be sure to take advantage of them. Once complete, the process then turns to marketing. You’ll want to start pinging search engines and social media with links to the presentation, giving it maximum visibility. Create a new blog post promoting the SlideShare and share it to social media and via email. You may even wish to run an ad campaign promoting the new content if it is relevant to a particular audience.

Ultimately, any solid piece of content you’ve created in the past can be given new life via SlideShare. Have you already thought of any potential posts you could convert? Tell us what you think are the biggest advantages or drawbacks to presentations below in the comments.