Posterous is one the easiest ways to blog. It is free to use and you don’t even have to sign up to use the service.
Over the past few weeks Posterous has been busy rolling out new features such as comment moderation, pages, and sidebar links.
Along with all of the new features, they have introduced new tools to help bloggers switch from what they call dying platforms. Posterous has been wooing bloggers from services such as Tumblr and Ning and are now gunning for ActiveRain users.
If you are a real estate professional, you need a blog to demonstrate your expertise about your local market, promote your listings and network with other agents.
According to ActiveRain, the site has 185,560 professionals.
How many of these users will switch to Posterous? It will be interesting to see if this puts any pressure on ActiveRain.
Here is what is good about ActiveRain:
1) It is a community of Real Estate Professionals, a large communtiy. When you blog on ActiveRain, your blog is not only read by other real estate professionals, but by those seeking real estate advise. There are great conversations about current real estate issues and trends.
2) You can search ActiveRain for a local real estate professional. Homebuyers and sellers can easily search the site for a real estate professional in their city or county.
3) ActiveRain has numerous tools specifically designed for real estate professionals and consumers like home buying and selling guides, real estate training, networking, and marketing.
Here is what is bad about ActiveRain:
1) While it is free to sign up, you have to pay a membership fee if you want your blog post to be seen by more than just the ActiveRain Members.
2) When you blog on ActiveRain, you blog on ActiveRain. In other words, you can not take your blog posts from ActiveRain to WordPress and vise versa.
So which one is the better blogging platform?
For many bloggers, the openness of Posterous makes it a better platform. Not only is it dead simple to blog on Posterous, you can easily share it with other sites. Posterous also boasts many features like being able to register your own domain, automatically update Facebook and Twitter, easily post video, it has a bookmarklet for easy posting, and allows you to use Google Analytics to see who is viewing your Posterous site.
While ActiveRain might not be as open or have as many features, it is a large community of real estate professionals and a great place for real estate conversation and advise.
How do you switch from ActiveRain to Posterous?
Moving your ActiveRain blog to Posterous is simple. Just go toposterous.com/switch/activerain/ and enter in your ActiveRain user name and email address.
We’ll take it from there. You don’t even need to set up an account. We’ll send you an email when we’re done copying over your blog. And don’t worry, your ActiveRain blog will still be intact. Not convinced? Get the straight scoop atswitchto.posterous.com from real estate professionals like Sandy.
Still not sure what Posterous is?
Posterous is a reverse lifestreaming service. Lifestreaming services like Friendfeed pull all of your content from all over the web into one place. So all of your tweets, YouTube videos, blog posts, etc. will show up as one stream of information. Posterous on the other hand takes the content you post to their site and posts it to other services like Flickr, Facebook, WordPress, and many others:
Be sure to check out the FAQ section on the Posterous website to learn more.
Do you blog on ActiveRain? Would you consider switching to Posterous?
**Updated in response to the comments**
I do have a free ActiveRain account. As it was mentioned above, for my blog posts on ActiveRain to be public I would have to upgrade to a Rain Maker account:
This upgrade costs $29.00 per month:
There are members of ActiveRain that have a free RainMaker accounts and their posts do get indexed by Google and are visible to the public. These free accounts unfortunately no longer exist.
Related posts:
{ 6 comments }
Posterous= drag, drop, e-mail hit send and you are a blogger…to the world.
Thanks Duke, It does not get any easier than that!
I didn’t know they were going to take on ActiveRain either, it will be interesting to see who they take on next. I have an account with ActiveRain like you. The funny thing is I didn’t know how much it cost to make my posts public on their site, I just knew it was not free and any amount of money was too much for me. $30 per month is pricey too!
Well Bryan, this may be a question as to what blog platform is easier to use versus what platform really gets you results. I have blogs on both platforms, AR (Active Rain) since 2007 and Posterous since 2009. My AR blog is the “free” version, not paid. And, I can attribute my involvement in AR with 3 appraisal orders since 2007. I’ve become friends with 4 local agents through my involvement in AR as well. I think I’m also still in the Top 5 Appraisers on AR points wise, which is no big deal, just diligence and posting your content to more than 1 platform. If you’re going to take the time to write a well thought out blog post, why only publish it to one platform….I’ve never been dinged for duplicate content that I know of.
AR: The positives and negatives. Both are recognized as authority sites, so both rank well PR wise. However, AR is real estate themed, real estate recognized and based….so the question remains will Google better recognize your “real estate professional” post on AR than it will Posterous? I know I receive my google alerts within minutes to hours of submission on AR and not quite as fast on Posterous. Of course though, I have posted to AR more than Posterous. So, Google wise, AR has worked well for me and Google is the 800lbs Gorilla that matters.
Brad Andersohn with AR. All I can say is that my experience with AR has been helped by Brad Andersohn at AR. With 185K members, I can still email Brad and get his attention and a reply. Last time I emailed him, he personally called me back with an answer and how my question could better help the users of AR in the future.
Wisdom. Since AR is real estate related, I’ve learned a great deal about topics real estate related from the veterans and newbies postings. It does me good to see and read what’s going on in other parts of the U.S. and how others appraisers handle certain situations.
The negative on AR. The negative of the AR platform is the difficulty in making your post look good, even awesome, with their limited html posting for video and audio. In fact, I never have figured out AR’s method to their madness when it comes to posting and getting your images within the post to remain where you want them. That is a negative! I hate their WYSIWYG html feature. I’ve overcome this by posting my blog post on my own blog the way it’s supposed to look first and then posting an excerpt with an enticing image on AR with a link to click on to visit my blog for the remainder. This benefits my blogs immensely by having links from an authority site such as AR.
Why not post your same content to AR, Posterous, Ning, etc…using different titles for each different platform? There’s a way to spread your message and get ranked for a wide variety of keyword phrases.
Just my thoughts on my somewhat positive experience using AR. I do love receiving my weekly Posterous email updates from those I’m subscribed to. After reviewing a Posterous email update I just received, I can see why Posterous can make such a claim. Guy Kawasaki’s post look so awesome on Posterous!
Bryan, it’s just absolutely amazing to me what can be accomplished online with just 1 single blog and Google indexing. 5 Years ago, it wasn’t nearly this easy!
Appreciate You!
Bill
Bill, great info. Only 3 orders and 4 friends from local agents through ActiveRain in 3 years seems low for what I would image would be a lot of time on the site. I think you are right, and like I said in the blog post, the biggest benefit of ActiveRain is the large community there, there is a ton of good info and conversations about real estate trends and issues. I do disagree with you about duplicating content, my personal philosphy is to use different medians for different reasons, targeting different audiences, and creating different content. When I first posted to ActiveRain I duplicated a few blog posts from this website, it was way to difficult and time consuming, and like I said, I now personally believe different services should be used differently. You are right that ActiveRain is hard to use and make your posts look good, hopefully they feel a little pressure from Posterous and make it easier for bloggers. Thanks for the info and comment Bill!
Bill, I have a free account on ActiveRain. When I blog on ActiveRain, it is not visible to everyone and does not get indexed on the search engines. I am given the option to upgrade to RainMaker Account for $29 a month. This is extremely high, especially given your comments that you have received 3 orders in 3 years from the website. I updated the blog post with images showing this information. Thanks for the comment, it was a good one and you gave a lot more information about the topic.
{ 1 trackback }