One of the most common resistance that I come across when talking to small businesses about blogs and blogging is “I do not have any time to blog”
I can sympathise with this, as blogging can be a time consuming exercise and its bloody hard work to keep the content coming. Anyway in this post I will highlight some tools that allow you to quickly and easily get blogging without it be a major time suck.
Micro-blogging
I am not going to discuss Twitter in this post as it gets enough coverage elsewhere. However if you want to have a richer micro blogging experience there are some very interesting alternatives.
Microblogging is a form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically much smaller, in both actual size and aggregate file size. A microblog entry could consist of nothing but a short sentence fragment, or an image or embedded video.
As with traditional blogging, microbloggers post about topics ranging from the simple, such as “what I’m doing right now,” to the thematic, such as “sports cars.” Commercial microblogs also exist, to promote websites, services and/or products.
Tumblr
To quote Wikipedia
Tumblr is a blogging platform that allows users to post text, images, video, links, quotes, and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users are able to “follow” other users and see their posts together on their dashboard. Users can like or reblog other blogs on the site. The service emphasizes customizability and ease of use
Tumblr is a great platform, it has a variety of good looking themes to customise the look and feel of your tumblelog. Its a piece of cake to use, in fact you will be up and running in less than 5 minutes.
The biggest time saver is the ease of posting. You can create posts directly on the Tumblr website, via text message or email, using the bookmarklet, over the phone! and if you have an iphone you can use the free app, which I have to say is a great little application. Tumblr allows you to add images, text, video and links so you are not restricted as to what you can post.
I think Tumblr is awesome and a great way to get blogging quickly and to build a community around your content.
Posterous
Posterous takes quick and simple blogging to a whole new level. Forget signing up, simply send an email to post@posterous.com and you will get a reply with your posterous at yourname.posterous.com, simple! Once setup you simply email the content that you want to appear on your posterous blog. You can email text, photos,video,mp3’s and file attachments.
It is the most simple way to get up and running with a blog and is ideal if you are short on time or just want to post casually.
So, if you are short on time but want to have a go at blogging then these are useful tools that keep it all nice and simple.
You can follow me on my tumbleblog or my Posterous
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I really like Posterous. I use it as an overflow for off topic chatter that wouldn’t work on my other blogs. For instance, when I was doing food challenges I put it there.
Plus, I like that it autoposts to other sites. Sometimes I’ll upload pictures to Flickr that way.
Thanks for your comments. I agree, Posterous is an ideal platform for quick or overflow topics and yes the autoposting is useful and a massive timesaver.