Is Posterous My Biggest Blogging Productivity Tool?

This is a guest post from Chris Garrett

If you read that headline again you might think that my claim is too big to be true. I mean, look at the competition, for a start WordPress - the blogging tool of choice - surely that makes it the number one productivity tool for bloggers?

In fact, I have been stunned myself at how useful Posterous has been, and not just for me but friends too.

Allow me to explain ...

Back when I started blogging, it wasn't even called that. This was the days where if you wanted a website you had to either hand craft your HTML, or use a software tool. Either way you had to edit files and upload them to your website.

Next software like Blogger and WordPress came along. Creating blog posts was as simple as writing email. Write, hit publish, easy!

But then several things happened:

- People stopped linking so much because of Twitter, Facebook, and so on
- Video and other embedded media became much more popular
- The need to promote your content became much more urgent as audience attention was so fragmented.

This meant simply typing out a post and expecting people to see it was becoming a thing of the past.

If you want to get noticed you have to make sure you also connect it up in all your social media accounts, and it really helps if you are using video, pictures and audio too.
This is where Posterous comes in. When you post you can make it automatically notify all your social media friends, and even upload any video you create to YouTube, pictures to Flickr, and if you upload an audio file, it embeds a fancy little player! You can even post via email, with attachments automatically utilized with no conversion necessary.

Use WordPress? No problem, it can cross post to your existing blog too.

Right now I am only using it for my personal blog (http://chrisg.co.uk cross posted to http://chrisg.org) but I am already thinking of how I can use it more.
You can read more about my love of Posterous on my software and productivity blog

Chris Garrett is a professional blogger, Internet marketing consultant new media industry commentator, writer, coach, speaker, trainer and web geek. He is also co-author (with Darren Rowse) of the spectacularly successful book ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income Say hello to Chris at Chrisg.com