Voices

How to start a blog (and post to it) with minimal effort

IMGCAP(1)] I was casually chatting with our office neighbor, Roger, last week.

“I need to start blogging,” he told me.  “And posting educational videos.  And doing all the things I need to do to get my website found on the first page of Google.”
Why’s that, Rog?  

He continued: “The first thing my clients and potential clients do when they need my service is they search Google.  So that’s where I need to be – right on the first page – above my competitors, of course.”

You might be thinking that Roger’s clientele are Internet savvy consumers.  Want to take a shot at what they’re searching for?
“Sacramento bail bonds.”

That’s right – Roger sells bail bonds.  A true “old school” industry – and all of the lead generation is now happening online!

So Roger knows he needs to keep beefing up his online presence – by blogging, for starters.  But he’s not really a techie.  So – what should he do?


Blogging with minimum effort

Yesterday, I walked into his office, and showed him the simplest way to start and write a blog. In fact, it’s so easy, he can write a blog post without ever looking at his blog – which is perfect for someone like Roger, who has more important things to do than fool around with his blog platform.

The platform I showed him is Posterous – a no frills, dead simple way to post and share things on the internet.  

Last summer, we converted our company blog to Posterous, from WordPress. While WordPress is an outstanding blogging platform with no shortage of options and plug-ins, the complexity of the system was becoming too much for us to manage.  We just wanted a simple way to post articles that we wrote – that’s it!

With Posterous, creating blog posts is dead simple – you just send an email to a preassigned address.  The subject line of your email becomes the title of the post, while the body of the email becomes the body of the blog post.  

As soon as you hit the Send button in your email client, the post goes live.  Done and done!

Ideal for people who always wanted to start a blog

If you’ve always been meaning to start a blog, but you never seem to get around to it, I’d highly recommend that you set aside an hour to check out Posterous.

They’ve done an excellent job at taking the “I don’t want to deal with this” factor out of the equation.  You just sign up for an account, and start posting to your blog (which Posterous will host for you, of course).

And if you have social media channels you’d like to populate with this content, they’ve got that covered too – you can automatically Tweet and post new content to Facebook using their plug-ins.

 

Onwards

Online lead gen is a powerful trend that’s here to stay. When bail bond transactions are starting with a Google search, it’s likely that your potential prospects are starting their search with Google as well!

And we all know that online marketing 101 says you should start a blog. If this is something you haven’t gotten around to yet, it’s probably because the effort has loomed large in your head. For a dead simple way to start, check out Posterous today.

 

 

Brett Owens is chief executive and co-founder of Chrometa, a Sacramento, Calif.-based provider of time-tracking software that records activity in real time. Previously marketed to the legal community, Chrometa is branching out to accounting prospects. Gains include the ability to discover previously undocumented billable time, saving time on billing reconciliation and improving personal productivity. Brett can be reached at 916-254-0260 and brett@chrometa.com.

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