Posterous is an awesome site. It basically allows you to post content to multiple sites that you choose, including the top social networks and blogging platforms, simply by sending it an email. We were thinking about creating a plugin for WordPress specifically for this but it would seem that Posterous has already nailed it.
One of the main barriers why I don’t post to certain sites is the load time, logging in and formatting, particularly with WordPress. Posterous takes these soft obstacles out of the way making it even easier to share your content with your different networks. There is an initial bit of setup but as soon as that’s sorted you’re away!
Updated: Nov 17th PM – Not Quite So Easy…
In response to Nick’s comment below I thought i’d add in this extra piece of info.
How to avoid dupe content best practice SEO for Posterous
When you sign up to Posterous you’ll notice that it automatically sets you up with your own posterous feed. So the process of emailing to post content looks like this…
Emailed Content > Your Posterous Feed > Selected Platforms (WP, Flickr, Twitter etc)
Posterous acts as the middle man. Having a feed of all the types of content can be useful, although my main motivations for using Posterous were similar to those that Nick has pointed out below around basically making it easier to email posts to a range of different blogs.
For the SEO educated you may think surely there’s some duplicate content issues there, and you’d be exactly right. I did some tests around some blog posts that a colleague had posted to a few different blogs through Posterous and sure enough the domain ranking top was the one with more equity which in most cases will be Posterous.
I came across this blog post from Vertical Leap which helps to overcome the issue by explaining how to create a customised theme and place the ‘noindex’ metatag into your Posterous feed header.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”>
For the casual blogger or someone that simply wants to get content out there as quickly and easily as possible this probably isn’t an issue, but if you want to safeguard your blog’s traffic whilst gaining the benefits of being to post to multiple blog platforms depending on the content type this could be a solution.
Other options could be…
1. Manually deleting your Posterous feed posts
2. Focusing your efforts purely on Posterous
3. Putting up with the dupe content and risk missing out on some traffic to your personal domain
4. Changing your Posterous feed to private (this will mean any links and content in your feed won’t be visible externally)
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Interesting…I played with Posterous and hated it, but mostly because the interface was so boring and simplistic, and I missed all of the rich features of WordPress (widgets, blog rolls, etc). I didn’t think about using it merely as a content distribution network – is that how you plan on using it? Posting via Posterous then publishing it to your main WP blog? Will you block spiders from Posterous then to avoid dup. content issues?