Posterous Guide to Dead Simple Blogging

Posterous is a blogging platform that sits somewhere between micro-blogging (Twitter) and traditional blogging (WordPress).

You can post all sorts of rich media to your own Posterous blog including photos, video, MP3′s, files (doc, ppt, pdf), Google maps, links, blog posts, podcasts..all via email. Posterous is the place to post everything.

Posterous is the dead simple way to put anything online using email.

Getting Started

Create Account

To get started all you need to do is send a blank email to post@posterous.com,

You will immediately receive a reply email back from Posterous.

The first thing you should do is set a password for your account by clicking on the create password link in the email,

Choose a name for your Posterous site, enter a password.. then click <Sign up>,

Edit Profile

Click on Edit Profile,

Then enter your name, nickname, a profile blurb and upload a photo.. click <Save> once you are done. You have just created your profile,

Manage Emails

If you want to be able to post to your Posterous blog from your work address or your other email address you will need to add them in. Click on Manage emails and phone,

Add in any additional email addresses you want to be able to post from and click on <Add email>,

Once you confirm your email address you will be able to post from it.

Notification Settings

Set your notification settings as appropriate then click on <Save notification settings>,

Google Analytics

You can use Google Analytics to collect all sorts of detailed statistics about visitors to your blog such as where they are from in the world, how long they spent viewing your blog, which posts are the most popular and much, much more.

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account signup for a free one here.. then login.

Click on Add new account,

Click on <Sign Up>,

Enter,

Website URL: your Posterous URL goes here, eg yourname.posterous.com

Account Name: yourname.posterous.com

Country: your country

Time zone: your time zone

Click on <Continue>,

Next enter your contact information, then click <Continue>,

Agree to the Terms of Service, then click <Create New Account>.

Finally, you will be given a whole heap of code to paste into your site.. don’t worry about this, just click on <Finish>.

Your Google Analytics account has now been setup an you will see an ID number (eg UA-1234567), which you need to make a note of,

Go back to Posterous and click on Manage at the top of the page,

Click on Manage this site,

Click on <Edit Site>,

Paste in your Google Analytics ID and click <Save>,

To see the statistics relating to your Posterous blog just login to your Google Analytics account.

Edit Your Site

While we are on the Edit your Site page let’s do just that, before we get into the fun of actually posting stuff.

Edit your site’s name and add a sub heading,

If you want other people to contribute to your blog send them an email and invite them to contribute,

Next set the control settings on who can do what,

Finally set your privacy settings as appropriate, then click <Save> to save all your changes,

Posting to Posterous

You can post heaps of different things to your Posterous blog via email which I will run through.

When posting via email just remember,

• Email Subject = Title of your Post
• Email Body = Body of your Post

And send the email to post@posterous.com

It doesn’t get much simpler than that!

If you have an email signature and you don’t want it to appear,  just end your post with ‘#end’ and everything after that will be ignored,

Click on My Posterous to view your first post,

Successful post.. also with no email signature,

Posting Photos

To post photos just attach them to your email. Photos can be of any size and Posterous will automatically resize them to fit your post.

Tags can be added to your blog by inserting them in the subject of the email.

The syntax for tags is,

((tag: photos))

If you attach more than one photo Posterous will create an image gallery for you,

Posting Videos

Videos can be posted as well.

You can either attach a video or paste in the URL of the video,

YouTube video links become embedded in your blog,

Posting Music

You can attach music to an email and have that posted to your Posterous blog as well,

Posterous embeds the music file into your blog where you (and others) can play,

Posting Google Maps

Google Maps can easily be embedded on your Posterous blog simply by email the link,

Google Maps are just another thing you can add to your blog,

Posterous also lets you post files to you blog. These include doc, ppt and pdf. The process is exactly the same as above.. just attach it to an email and click send.

Posting via the Web

You can always post content from your Posterous dashboard.. Click on Manage, then select Post by web in the drop-down menu,

Bookmarklet

You can select text, video, music or photos from any web page and post it instantly to your Posterous blog, just by clicking a special bookmark.

Get your bookmarklet here.

All you need to do is literally drag this bookmark into your toolbar,

When you are surfing the web and see some content that you want to post to your Posterous blog.. just click on the <Share on Posterous> bookmarklet.

A Posterous window will appear similar to an email.. just fill out the title and body and click on <Post>,

Autoposting

The great thing with Posterous is that you can also post your to your other social networks as well.

You can also post to other sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo, WordPress.com.

You can post your photos to Flickr, Picasa and Facebook.. or to your WordPress or Tumblr sites.. all at the same time.

You will need to go here to add one of these services.. then click on <Add a Service>,

Select the service you want to add, I’m adding Twitter,

Click <Add Twitter Account>,

Enter your Twitter details then click <Allow>,

My Twitter account has just been added,

Just repeat this process for all the services you want to add.

How to Autopost

If you want to post EVERYWHERE (ie to all services) then send an email to post@posterous.com,

This posts to all my services.. my Posterous blog,

And my Twitter account (plus any other services I had added),

If you DON’T want to autopost to any of your other services (ie to Posterous ONLY).. then just send an email to posterous@posterous.com,

This posts only to my Posterous blog.. but not on Twitter (or any of the other services I had added),

If you want to post to one of your other services then email, eg,

• Twitter – twitter@posterous.com
• Flickr – flickr@posterous.com
• Facebook – facebook@posterous.com
• Tumblr – tumblr@posterous.com
• Any other blog – blog@posterous.com

This posts both my Posterous and Twitter accounts.. it would not appear on another of the other services I had,

You can use the following service names to email to: twitter, facebook, flickr, picasa, blog, blogger, tumblr, youtube, vimeo, friendfeed, delicious, laconica, identica, livejournal, plurk, shopify.

You can also combine these services and post to multiple platforms.

For example, if you wanted to post to Twitter and Facebook you would send an email to twitter+facebook@posterous.com, or if you wanted to post your photos to your online albums you could send an email to flickr+picasa+facebook@posterous.com

Finally..

Wherever you have access to email whether it is from your PC or from your phone, you can easily post new and rich content to your Posterous blog.

Posterous seems to be getting better everyday with new features being enabled and making things easier for users to share content.

It is just dead easy!

http://matthewtommasi.posterous.com/

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