Do you manage one or more blogs? While blogging is fun, managing multiple blogs can become tedious. Not only do you need to regularly post content, each blog has its own login credentials to remember. If you use several different platforms such as WordPress and Blogger, you also have several different Web sites to access just to post your thoughts. If you’re looking for a better way to manage your blog posts, Windows Live Writer is it.
Windows Live Writer is one of the free programs offered by Microsoft in its Windows Live Essentials package. At first glance, it looks like a basic word processing program. You may be tempted to discount Windows Live Writer due to this. After all, you already have a more powerful word processor, right? Before you discount the program, take a deeper look. Yes, it has word processing features; however, it isn’t designed to be a word processor but rather a publishing tool.
Manage Multiple Blogs
Instead of signing into multiple blog sites and posting your content online, use Windows Live Writer to write your content and then publish it directly to your selected blog once you are happy with your draft. Windows Live Writer also allows you to set up multiple blog accounts. Once set up, Windows Live Writer communicates with your online blog, incorporating theme elements into your posts as well as allowing you to preview your posts with your current settings. For example, if your blog’s theme uses Heading 2 for all blog post titles, whenever you use Windows Live Writer to create content for that blog, Heading 2 will be pre-assigned for your post’s title.
A drop down box in the upper right corner of the screen makes it easy to select the blog that you want to work with. Once selected, simply begin writing your blog post. Should you change your mind and decide the blog post is better suited to one of your other blogs, simply select the appropriate blog from the drop down box and your text will be formatted for the new blog selection automatically.
After creating the blog’s content, add categories and tags and run the built-in spellchecker. As soon as you’re ready to publish the blog post, click the Publish button and your blog entry will be immediately posted to your blog!
Schedule Future Posts
At the bottom right corner, Windows Live Writer features blog scheduling which allows you to create a blog post ahead of time and publish it at a later date. This is a terrific way to ensure that you are regularly updating your blog with content. For example, at the beginning of each month you could create a series of blog entries and then schedule them for automatic publishing throughout the month.
Access Your Content Offline
Another benefit of using Windows Live Writer is that you have easy access to all of your blog posts via a folder (called My Weblog Posts in the My Documents folder) on your computer. As time goes by, you may want to revive some of your older posts or repurpose them for other uses. Since they are easily accessed via this folder on your computer, you can quickly retrieve the content and revise it to match your current needs.
At first glance, Windows Live Writer is a simple program. The more you use it, the more you will love how simple this program makes managing blog posts and multiple blogs.
[Download Windows Live Writer]
This is a guest post by Dee from ForeverGeek.com.
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