One way to make writing blog posts a little easier is by utilizing Open Live Writer, a desktop blog-publishing application, developed by multiple authors and contributors.
There are several perks for Open Live Writer.
1. It is FREE
Blogging professionally can get expensive. There are all sorts of hidden fees you don´t think about when you first embark on the blogging adventure – buying a domain name, hosting fees, finding and retaining a good Web designer, learning how to do Web design and Web development yourself … and the list goes on. So any tool that is free and actually useful is a definite plus.
2. You can Blog Anywhere, Anytime
One of the biggest perks of Open Live Writer is that it allows you to craft blog posts even when you don´t have an Internet connection. So if you are suddenly struck with one of those phenomenal post ideas but can´t access your Website, here is the solution. It allows you to draft a post and save it until you are able to go online and publish your post.
3. Built-in Pinging Feature
Whenever you published a blog post, Open Live Writer will ping all major search engines. This way your post will appear much faster in search results. This is a great feature in terms of getting your blog more traffic, and it takes some of the promotion work from you.
4. Adding Images
Images are, in my opinion, one of the most important parts of in-depth posts. They allow the blogger a chance to breathe in between long-winded thoughts, and give the reader a much needed content break. However, anyone using any of the standard blogging platforms knows that it can be a very long, drawn out process to add images to posts. However, with Open Live Writer, uploading multiple images is nearly painless.
5. More options
Open Live Writer also gives you more options in regards to font, text size, and many free plugins. Every blogger knows how important plugins can be for blogging – they allow you to customize and extend the functionality of your blog, so having access to more of them make perfect sense. Open Live Writer also syncs with your blog´s design, allowing you to preview it offline as you would online, and it also imports the previous 500 posts from your blog.
6. And More Reasons
Are you not satisfied yet? Open Live Writer offers a wealth of other features such as: WYSIWYG authoring, video and map publishing functionality, time stamping, tagging, categories, spell checking and more. It enables instant previews and I also like the source view screen. And best of all, It supports multiple blogging platforms such as WordPress, Share Point, TypePad and Blogger.
Drawback
The only drawback for Open Live Writer is that it only supports Windows Operating Systems. No luck for Unix/Linux or Mac users!
