Beyond this simplicity however, there are some cool things you can do to unleash the power of the platform. In this article, let us look at some Posterous tips for power users.
Posterous Tip #1: Use Posterous on a Subdomain
The Posterous Help describes how you can set it up on your custom domain. But what if you use Wordpress or Blogger to power the main blog of your site? In this case, it makes sense to setup Posterous on a subdomain of your site.
If your site is www.yourname.com, you can setup posterous.yourname.com as your Posterous site. Follow these steps to do so:
Setup the subdomain as you wish on your domain using tools provided by your domain host. Typically these will be part of your Control Panel or Dashboard.
Add a CName Record: “posterous.yourname.com. IN CNAME posterous.com.” You may have to ask your domain hosting support to do this for you.
Specify the subdomain in Manage > Settings.
Posterous Tip #2: Selective Autopost
Beyond posting your email and other media to your Posterous blog, you can set it up to automatically post to other services as well.
To enable Autopost, go to Manage > Autopost and add the services you wish. Now, when you email post@posterous.com, your post is automatically sent to all the services you have configured under Autopost settings.
There are times when you don’t want to autopost everywhere. There is no need to change your settings just for such instances. You can selectively autopost, by tweaking the email address.
As an example, suppose you have configured Facebook, Flickr and Twitter under your Autopost settings. Let’s say you use Flickr for all your cool outdoor photographs and prefer Facebook for photographs of people at conferences you attend. You also want to tweet when you post any photos anywhere. When emailing your photos, send your outdoor nature photography toflickr+twitter@posterous.com, and send conference photos to facebook+twitter@posterous.com.
Posterous Tip #3: Advanced Facebook Autopost
By default, Posterous does not post your photos and videos to your Facebook photo albums and videos. For more fine-grained control over how Posterous auto-posts to Facebook, on the Autopost settings page, go to Edit under Actions for the Facebook service.
First, choose whether you want Posterous to actually update your Facebook status message, or simply update your activity stream. Then, you can choose to enable autoposting of photos and videos if you wish. The Minimum gallery size determines the number of photos that creates a separate Facebook album.
Posterous Tip #4: Advanced Bookmarklet Settings
Using the bookmarklet is almost a must to make the best use of Posterous. The bookmarklet makes it very simple to instantly post text, documents, pictures, music or video from any web page to your Posterous.
From the Advanced Options link at the bottom of the bookmarklet, you can also include tags and choose whether to autopost that item to your other services.
Posterous Tip #5: Use Google Analytics to Track Traffic Stats
Bring the awesome power of Google Analytics to your Posterous blog to see detailed traffic stats. Here’s how:
If you haven’t sign up for Google Analytics with your Posterous site URL.
Get the Google Analytics Domain ID for your site, which looks like “UA-123456-1” with different numbers.
Enter the Domain ID in Manage > Settings > Analytics in Posterous.
Now you can see page views, average time spent on site, referring sites, and a plethora of other traffic stats.
Posterous Tip #6: Use Feedburner For Your Posterous RSS Feed
You can replace the default RSS Feed provided by Posterous with a Feedburner one. With Feedburner, you can keep track of the number of your RSS subscribers, create browser-friendly feeds, add social bookmarking links, and lots more.
To use Feedburner with Posterous, follow these steps:
Get your Posterous Feed URL (seen on the right of your Posterous blog).
Burn that feed in Feedburner and copy the feed address you create.
In Manage > Settings > Analytics, specify the part of your Feedburner URL afterhttp://feeds.feedburner.com/.
You now get all the benefits of using Feedburner for your Posterous RSS Feed.
These are some of the ways to get more out of Posterous. Have other Posterous tips to share? Tell us in the comments!