Managing Multiple Blogs With Gmail and Posterous

Coming up on my second year of blogging and internet marketing and I find myself with dozens of domains and at least 12 blogs that I want to keep up to date with fresh content.  Until recently this had been a major challenge but I have finally come up with a process that simplifies the task.

Using only gmail, Google reader and Posterous, I can now easily post to two or three blogs each day.  

To accomplish this takes a about 30 minutes to an hour set up for each blog that you want to manage but the set-up time is time well spent as it will save you many hours in the future.  Here's the basic steps to get started with your own Blog Management System:

1. If are not already using gmail, sign up for a gmail account to use has your master account.
2. If don't already have an email address specifically for your niche, sign up one with gmail.
3. Redirect your mail from this address to be redirected to your master account.  (This will allow you to view all incoming mail in one place)  To do this go to Settings: Forwarding and POP/IMAP: Add a Forwarding Address.  This is a two step process as you need to verify the address from your master account and then come back and Enable Forwarding.  You can at this time elect to Delete the mail from the original box or Archive a copy after forwarding. 
4. The next step is to add your niche address to your master email account as a Sending From address.  This will be done from the Settings tab in the master email account.  Just pick Send From Another Email address and add your niche address.  Again this will have to be verified.
5. The next step is to create a Posterous account for your niche, using your unique niche email address.  Add at least a half dozen sites to autopost to, including your blog in this list is optional.  Some experts believe you publish to your blog separately.
6. Now you are set up to add content to any of your Posterous accounts directly from your master email account simply by selecting the niche address as your Sent From address when emailing a post to post@posterous.com.  
7. You can also add your master account as a Contributor to your niche Posterous account by going to Autopost page and selecting Contributor tab, adding your master email account to each niche Poserous account.  Doing this will make it possible to post to any Posterous account (and it's related autopost pages) through the Email this options in Sharoholic or some other quick email key.  When using one of these choices you must email your post to post@nichename.posterous.com...  where nichename is replaced with your Posterous page name.    For example:  I can post this article to My Favorite Online Business Tools directly from my email account or by emailing the article to post@posterous.com from one of the email addresses listed as Contributors for that account.

Setting up my blogs to post through Posterous and Gmail allows me to use the Google Reader to research and study my niche and  and using the Email button in Google Reader I can direct a comment on a article in my Reader to any Posterous account that has my master account is listed as a contributor.

If you run into a problem following these directions, please let me know.  This is my first attempt at outlining the procedure...there may be glitches.