I’ve mentioned SlideShare recently and got asked a couple of questions about it. Some of the answers involve turning yourself into a kind of Sherlock Holmes person but without spending hours deducing things.

The first question was selecting the category if there wasn’t an immediately obvious match.

My personal view is that most people don’t search by category – it’s on a lot of sites but I think that’s for historic reasons.

My guess is that most people searching on Ebay, YouTube, Amazon and near enough anywhere else use the search box.

OK, sometimes there’s a drill-down category selection offered and (annoyingly in my view) sites like Amazon don’t allow all searches to happen unless you’ve selected a category from the often almost identical ones offered. I guess that’s down to some programming issues that wouldn’t be cheap or easy to solve.

But with Amazon maybe 9 times out of 10, the item I’m looking for comes up anyway, so it’s not a problem unless I want to spend ages in research mode, reading reviews.

Which is a long way of saying that selecting a “good enough” category is plenty good enough.

Whilst I’m not privvy to the internal search engines of these sites, a good rule of thumb is that if there’s a box to be filled in, fill it in.

Computers are simple creatures like that.

The more boxes you’ve filled in, the more chances you have of showing up in the site’s own results and – since the info from the boxes is likely to be used on the page that gets created – you’ve given Google extra information as well.

I read something recently that said Amazon’s own search engine works that way – make sure every single box that you can add info to has info in it. I know Google’s “local” listings use the same principle. There’s probably a “percentage of boxes filled in” score that will be used as a tie breaker when the results are shown.

If you’re still not sure of the category, the next thing is to check your competitors – hence the Sherlock Holmes mode I mentioned in the title although in reality you’d be closer to his apprentice’s apprentice mode. Because it’s simple:

• Do a search for your main keyword on the site
• Check the categories of the first few results that come up and see which you agree with most

For instance, I just checked a few meditation presentations.

The first was from 2010 and had no category at all. The others were spread across several other categories including Health, Spiritual (meditation is often categorised there) and Self Improvement.

Which, for me, means I’d choose Self Improvement for the category as that’s where I think there’s a good fit. But others in the market could equally choose Spiritual or Health.

And since all those categories came up in the search results I personally wouldn’t take too much time worrying about getting it perfectly right because I’d show in the results regardless.

With SlideShare, the only categories I’d be really conscious of are the two in the main menu – Technology and Education. Every other category is under the “More Topics” option.

The same kind of logic would apply to any other site I’m adding content to: if there’s a category, select one that’s sensible enough.

The second was finding similar sites to get traction with.

That’s a case of using Google to help you.

If the presentation has a clickable link in it, you can do a search that starts with link: immediately followed by the URL of the page or site.

There may also be a link in the person’s profile – that can be quicker to get to rather than clicking through lots of slides before you find one.

This will probably show you a few links – by no means all as Google don’t like giving away that information but usually enough to get you going.

Sites like Ahrefs and Semrush will give you a handful more for free and that’s normally plenty to get you going if you run the same search on a few different domains. Explore the sites you find – chances are that you’ll pick up quite a few other places that will accept your content and give you a link in exchange for it.

Or if you want lots more data without the subscription fees, go to Fiverr and buy a gig. But, as usuall, beware of information overload. I think it’s almost always a case of “less is more” with data.

If there’s no obvious link – which seems to be the case quite often on SlideShare although I’ve never really worked out why you’d do that – then the user name is another thing to search for.

Most people use the same user name across multiple sites. That’s just human nature at work. And one of those should be a profile with a link.

Again, personally, I prefer the low hanging fruit. So if I can’t find a link in the profile or the presentation, I’d move on to the next. With 44,000 results for meditation currently on SlideShare it’s not like I’m stuck for choice.

As usual, the thing is to move quickly rather than getting bogged down.

If you hit a dead end, move on to the next lead. Of the 4 meditation articles I checked, 2 had links to the author’s website which is plenty to be going on with.

There’s almost never a single “correct” answer with internet marketing so whatever you choose will probably be OK.