If you are going to earn money writing online, you are going to need a website. If you are going to have a website that attracts enough attention from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Altavista, and others to actually drive any traffic to your website, you are going to need a blog or other section of your small business website that gets updated on a regular basis. If you are going to have enough time to dedicate to being an entrepreneur and running your small business successfully, you will occassionally find it difficult to update your blog as often as you would like.
The answer to this chain of reality is to allow yourself to post small mini-updates to your business blog along with longer, more involved updates. After all, new posts are new posts, and Google especially, loves fresh content.
However, once those tiny posts turn into small articles that are no longer fresh, they become clutter that hinders the navigation of your website both by search engine robots, and by your human visitors, as well. This is especially true of getting deep levels of content indexed by Google that may not have recieved the proper amount of link building attention, and for those human users who find your stuff so compelling that they keep clicking NEXT or OLDER POSTS in order to keep reading. Hit either of them with too many small, no longer fresh and relevant, posts, and both of them will quit and go elsewhere.
The latest buzz about Posterous developing ways to migrate almost any posting, blogging, or website building, service to Posterous reminded me of the value and utility of the Posterous website.
Essentially, Posterous is a blogging service that can be used either as a full blogging platform, like WordPress or Blogger, or as a mini-blogging platform, more like Friendster or Tumblr. Either way, Poserous has tools that allow for website owners and small business savvy freelance writers to update multiple websites and platforms automatically. By setting Posterous to automatically update or publish an article or summary to your freelance writing business blog, you can keep that homepage content fresh by writing posts, either small or not, on Posterous and them having them pushed to your blog.
The key to using this feature for maximum value, is to push those posts in such a way that they show up on your writing blog when they are fresh and new, and then disappear as they become forgotten clutter.
Sign up for Posterous and set it to push content to your blog via RSS feed or other method so that as you write on Posterous one or two of those postings appear on your live blog to keep it fresh for readers and search engine bots. Then, as you write new stuff on Posterous, those fresh articles take the place of the fading articles preventing any clutter from accumulating. As an added bonus, those items aren’t deleted or thrown away, rather they are archived on your Posterour blog for as long as you like. That way, if something that was new and fresh becomes old and busted, but later becomes new and fresh again, you not only still have it, you still have it published.
Check out Posterous and see if it is right for you. (This is not an affiliate link. If I stumble across some program that has one, that might change, but for now, this endorsement comes without any compensation of any kind.)