Getting Social, Part 5: Building Your List & Leveraging Features at Scribd

In this segment, we’ll discover how to build your list with downloads, and how to leverage the features at Scribd.com to your advantage.

Building Your List With Downloads
No doubt you’ve heard the saying, “the power is in the list.” Your mailing list is perhaps your most valuable business asset. By building and maintaining a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a great deal of time, effort and expense in marketing – simply by focusing on your existing list of targeted prospects.

Never Underestimate the Power of “Free”
Everyone loves to receive things for free. Why not use this to your advantage? There are many things that you could potentially offer that would serve as both valuable content, as well as promotional tool. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Software script or utility
• Reports or short ebooks
• Desktop wallpaper, signature avatars, etc
• Handy reference materials (conversion tables, etc)
• E-courses
• MP3 audio file of a past webinar or seminar event, teleconference call, etc.

TIP: You may wish to only upload a “teaser” or portion of an article, which then directs the reader to visit your website for the full report. This would enable you to create a lead-capture form on your homepage. It is very important that you capture those leads, and begin to build rapport. Today’s leads can be tomorrow’s customers!

Leveraging Features to Your Advantage
Users of Scribd search for content through browsing, searching for specific keywords, and through the tag cloud to find related documents within whatever topic they’re interested in.

Using Search
When a user does a search on the Scribd website, they will likely do so by typing in a keyword. When the results of the search are returned, documents will show up in the search results based on various factors – the number of views, their popularity, number of discussion comments, how well-liked, how many times selected as a “favorite” by others, how relevant it is to the searched keyword, etc.

Another Option – Browse
Users also have the ability to browse through documents based on keywords. Again, when the results are returned, they will be displayed based upon a number of factors:

Users can view:

• The most popular documents
• The most liked documents
• The most viewed documents
• The most discussed documents

What you want to do is make sure that your documents are tagged properly, and that they target your specific audience.

Documents uploaded to Scribd are indexed according to:

• Title of a document
• Description of a document
• Content within a document
• Tags

Leveraging Tags
The tags used to describe the content within your document are very important. For example, if you’ve uploaded a document on dog training than you will want to use the appropriate tags. Tags are how users will find your documents on Scribd.

The Tag Cloud:
Find your niche or target a niche by clicking on a tag within the tag cloud. Look to see what documents show up in the results. When you do this, you’re specifically performing a tag search. Documents that have used the tag you selected in the tag cloud will show up in the search results.

What position the documents show up in the search results is initially based on the number of views the document has received, but users can sort the results in other ways as well.

There’s a very easy way to make sure your documents are positioned at the top of the results when people are searching for content in your niche using tags. First, let’s go back to the tag cloud: Let’s assume that we wanted to click on “branding”

NOTE: The size of the font of the tag indicates the popularity and frequency of the tag by Scribd’s users.

Users can sort the results of a tag search by views, relevance, most recent, most liked and the popularity score – a combination of all those factors.

Each tag search – whether done through the tag cloud, through the search box or by clicking on the tags of other documents – show up initially based on the number of views. Your goal is for all of your documents to show up “above the fold” (in the results that show up without the user having to scroll further down).

In our next segment, we’ll cover how to use the search queries at Scribd.