SlidesCarnival

Some of you had already asked me why the site had been without advertising for some time. SlidesCarnival has been sold to Canva, I can't tell you much more, so it's best to read their press release directly.

"We are thrilled to announce that SlidesCarnival has joined the Canva family! This is a huge step forward for the SlidesCarnival community and has enabled us to offer high-quality templates for the community with an Ad-free experience."

https://www.slidescarnival.com/who-makes-slidescarnival

Finally I have started a blog with articles dedicated to presentation design. The idea is to offer something of added value to users besides templates, as well as to give new ideas on how to use them.

https://www.slidescarnival.com/category/presentation-design

I've been making some tweaks oriented to improve SEO (within my means):

• Create new tags and internal links
• Improve tag description in english, spanish and portuguese
• Improve H3 titles inside posts with keywords

Let's see if I increase the positioning of some long tail keywords

This had been on the "to do" list for quite some time now. I needed a template that:

• Worked better on mobile
• Was a little bit faster (the previous one was already good enough) - Offered native AMP support
• Supported Gutenberg new blocks
• Be up to the new competitors at a design level

It is the fourth template I use in SlidesCarnival. Changing always gives me laziness because I have very personalized templates with many features to improve loading times, SEO, etc and always "break" something in the moves.

It all went pretty well, though.

I publish my 100th template in SlidesCarnival. At this point I have been working on the project for 4 years and I have not abandoned it, yay!
SlidesCarnival is translated into 4 languages, has 1 million hits per month and more than 10,000 users subscribed to the newsletter.

I get a lot of emails asking almost always the same questions and I spend too much time answering them. Many of them are directly about how to make this or that in Powerpoint/GoogleSlides and not about my templates 🤷

So I've decided to complete the FAQ page with the most common topics. At least if people keep asking, I'll be able to redirect them to the right answer.

Copycats have started to appear, websites that publish templates very similar to mine and in many cases even use the same texts.

For now I'm not worried but I realize that any big player with a design team could make a website like mine, even much better. The value of SlidesCarnival is in the time it has been established and the keywords positioned.

SlidesCarnival is now making €5000 a month, and that would be enough to cover my expenses. However, I love my freelance job as interaction designer and I have no intention to quit.

Besides, all revenue depends on advertising and could disappear any day with an update of Google's algorithm and a drop in traffic.

Friends gave it the first push by sharing on social networks and even doing reviews on their blogs. The second push came when SlidesCarnival was reviewed in ProductHunt, which turned out to be great and I didn't even know they existed.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/slides-carnival

In the summer of 2014 I set up the project:

• I chose the name SlidesCarnival, among hundreds of options that I looked at in one of those web of combining words. The first and second option I had thought of were already registered and I didn't want to waste too much time on that topic.
• I created a base presentation with the most common slide types (which I selected by having a look at SlideShare). From it I designed 5 templates not to start with an empty website.
• I defined the structure and categories and set up a website in a day with Wordpress. I was sure I wanted to do it in English so it took me a lot longer to write all the texts for the home page, the instructions and the descriptions of the initial templates.
• I created the social profiles: Facebook, Twitter and Google+ (later I would add Pinterest)

All in all I dedicated the afternoons of a couple of weeks in July, and left everything ready to launch back from the holidays. In September I sent an email announcing it to family and friends and posted it on my social networks (which I have usually done in other personal projects).