Web Presence Strategies for Organizations and Individuals

Small businesses don’t always have the time to learn how to set up blogs and do the work of maintaining them. And yet, blogging can be one the most important ways to reach and interact with customers. What if blogging was as easy as sending an email?

Fortunately, the technical aspects of blogging can be as easy as sending an email. Enter Posterous. Posterous is a free service that allows anyone to blog without worrying about the technical burdens of traditional blogging. Once you sign up for the service, you have multiple posting options, including the option of simply emailing your content to the service.

How is this possible? Simple: when you register for the service, you provide your email and when you’re ready to publish content you send an email to Posterous@Posterous.com – the subject will be the title of your post and the body will be the post itself. It’s as easy as that.

In addition to posting from your email account, you can have your content automatically published to other services such as Twitter or Facebook, thus making the distribution of your message and presence for your customers speedy and effective. If you want to post your email to all of your services you just email Post@Posterous. Here are the posting options they offer:

• Posterous@Posterous.com – Posts just to your Posterous blog
• Post@Posterous.com – Posts to all of the services you have set up to automatically post your content
• Twitter@Posterous.com – Posts to your Twitter account only
• Facebook@Posterous.com – Posts to your Facebook account only
• Twitter+Facebook@Posterous – Posts to Twitter and Facebook accounts
• Flicker@Postersous – Posts to your Flickr account only

You post to many other services and you can select which services to post – all from just within email. You can see the full list of email options here. Of course you can also post and edit from within the administration panel.

If you don’t need a heavy-duty website but want the benefits of optimizing your search results and social media ecosystem, Posterous offers a custom domain service: rather than having YourBusiness.Posterous.com as your address, you can have it directed to your domain, so that your website address will be YourBusiness.com.

Additionally, you can have multiple sites all under one account, engage with your customers via Posterous’ built-in commenting system, easily share content from the web and instantly upload photos and other media via your mobile phone and assign multiple users to manage your account. Posterous even provides for Google Analytics, so you can track your readership.

Posterous may be one of the most cost-effective and user-friendly social media services for small businesses. What’s the point of a static website when you can tell your story as easily as sending emails? Will you sign up?

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