One of the biggest complaints about using social networking is wasted time. It takes a lot of keystrokes to get around to all the sites that are so popular these days: FaceBook, Twitter, Plurk, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and a dozen more. But now you can post to almost all of them at once.

Just follow these simple 7 steps :

Step 1 : Go to ping.fm and create an account (it’s free).

Step 2 : Once you get your account, go to the Dashboard and you will see a long list of places that ping will post to. The first one on the list is Twitter, so we’ll use that one as an example.

Step 3 : Click on Twitter. A new screen will come up. Simply enter your Twitter username and password. Click the boxes beside Status Updates and Micro-blogging. Hit Submit. You are now set up to post to Twitter.

Step 4 : Follow the same steps for any other sites you belong to that are on the list. If you sign up for posting to FaceBook, for example, when you send the email, the new post will also come up in the FaceBook status line. Cool, right?

Step 5 : Now that you’ve got your services set up, go to the top menu bar and click on Settings. Make sure the box beside Twitter and your other services are checked, giving ping permission to post there.

Step 6 : When you registered for your ping account, ping sent you a welcome email. In this email is a secret posting email address. It has some crazy letters then @ping.fm.

Step 7 : Put this email into your Contacts list as though it were a person, and name this phantom person Posting Address. Whenever you want to post to Twitter, FaceBook, or where ever, just write an email to Posting Address – no subject line, and no other words like signature or contact info – just the email address and your one-line Tweet. Then hit SEND.

Just that quick, you’ve posted to as many as two dozen places with one keystroke.

Rosey Dow – CEO of Experts in Focus, an Internet promotion company specializing in information marketing.