Posterous Problems

Posterous Support

As part of the Challenge, I set up a posterous account to tie together seven sites for posting articles relevant to a niche I had build a site around. It was easy to set up and worked marvelously. I could get content out to my network sites that contained a link to an article I was reviewing and just one link back to my main site. I set it up exactly as Ed Dale had recommended and it helped me get ranking for some long tail keywords fairly rapidly and retain them.  I wasn’t using it for spam and I recognized that some of the sites were no-follow but I was willing to be able to post to seven sites at a time with unique, useful content.

Then, last month, it just stopped working.

Posterous Support Sucks

I noticed that the posterous email I normally get when I posted to the blog didn’t show up. I attempted to log into the account and it let me do it but it said my blog was missing or deleted. An email to support told me the account had been banned.  Banned? What the hell for? The support email only pointed to the TOS and basically left it for me to figure out. An email from me asking for clarification was ignored. I checked the Challenge forum for others in the same boat. I found a thread where a member said they just wrote them and explained what they were doing and the account was un-banned.  I tried this as well and have been just as ignored.

So, what am I left with? A banned account that used to connect seven sites. I could just set up another posterous account and tie them together again until they decide to ban me again but without any clear idea of why I got banned that seems just plain silly. Not to mention a waste of time.

My conclusion: a service is only as good as its support and posterous’ support sucks. I would not recommend them to anybody. If people can’t reach somebody who is interested in working with them then they provide no value to anybody.

Let me just add, I wasn’t trying to game a system, spam it or get around their policies. I was using posterous as it is set up to be used. To publish to multiple sites and enjoy some limited link juice. The only possible thing they might not like is that the main site IS commercial but that’s true of probably 99% of the users and posterous knows this.

To all Challenge members: have you had any luck with posterous or have you been able to get a response of any kind from them? Please leave your comment below. Good or bad, tell me your experience.

Update

Since this article was posted I was able to get a wonderful support person at Posterous to reinstate the account. What I did was send a support email telling them I was interested in setting up an account and told them exactly what each post would entail and asked if any of that would be a TOS violation. When the support person wrote back and told me it wouldn’t, I explained that I had an account that had been disabled and that I only did what I previously told them. She took a look at the account and realized it had been disabled in error and reinstated it. Now, I have posterous working again and I didn’t have to re-establish the linking within a new account. It just works again.

She looked at my posts and could never figure out why it had happened in the first place. I thanked her and gave her kudos in her review system.

Patience and perseverence pays off! Yeah! I’ll let you know how it goes.