In the New Year, you wanted to start a blog for your business or for fun, but you can’t seem to decide on WordPress and you just want to get started. Welcome to the land of so-simple-it’s-like-email and it’s called Posterous.
I like Posterous because of its simplicity, but also because it takes away the technical queasiness when you want to share a video or a photo album. It’s like having your tech-savvy friend take your email and make it a cool post. It really is that simple, so let’s get started. Here are your step-by-step instructions on how to get started with Posterous:
1. Go to www.posterous.com and create an account.
a. You’ll get a confirmation email from Posterous asking you to confirm your account.
2. After you sign in, you’ll be taken to the page below and asked to email your first post to the email address post@posterous.com
3. It’s perfectly normal to send a simple first-post such as an introduction
E.g. This is James with MyBusiness. I’ll be sharing more about X, X, and X. If you have questions, comments, or ideas for posting, feel free to email me at james(at)mycompany(dot)com. You can also include a photo of your business or other image or video.
4. Next, go back to your Manage page and select Settings this is the place you can add an avatar (photo), your name and professional contact information.
5. You can also change the background theme
a. Go to My Posterous at the top of the page
b. It will take you to your personal page
c. At the top, select the “Posterous” button, it will expand and from there you can select Themes.
d. Choose a background theme that suits you.
e. Save changes at the end
6. You can post anytime by emailing post@posterous.com
a. Common things to post include: Answers to commonly asked questions, New information on new services or products, Examples of good work or innovations working for clients, Photos of new offerings, Photos of teams in action, Videos related to your work, products, services,
Monitor
Posterous allows you to receive auto-notifications when people comment, link, or respond to your post.
1. Under Manage, look for the Notifications option under Settings.
a. It’s a good idea to set up notifications around posts, links, comments.
2. If someone responds with a question, it’s a good idea to reply right there on the post so that others can read the answer as well.
Can I Comment on Post?
Posterous offers full commenting capability with the ability to enable anonymous comments as well as require Posterous, Facebook, or Twitter authentication. See the Commenting and Posting section of Settings from your Manage page.
Spreading the Post
This is one of the best features of Posterous, it will automatically help you spread your blog posts to other social networks.
1. Under Manage, you can select AutoPost
a. This pulls up a menu of other social sites
2. You can select your posts to be automatically shared with other sites, for example, on Twitter
a. This saves you from having to remember to share your good thoughts with other social sites, Posterous will do this automatically for you.
3. Be sure to save changes at the end
Posterous really is this simple. So if you’ve thought about creating a blog, but have stopped short because you thought it’d take too much time, well not any more. If you can send an email, you can blog. You can always find answers on “how-to” at http://help.posterous.com/. Now send us a link!