Ed Dale, in The 30 Day Challenge, has recommended that we use Flock for this year's challenge and WordPressDirect to host our actual blogs.  Both are great tools but the real beauty is how well these can be married to make blogging easier than ever before.

Having to log into your web site each time you want to blog something can be a real pain in the butt!  But, using Flock, you can avoid all that hassle and blog DIRECTLY from your browser!  Oftentimes, I will just select some text on a page, right-click it and then select "Blog This!".  When Flock's blog-editor window opens, it's already quoted the text I want to blog and it's already linked back to the main site for me!

Imagine how easy that could make adding content to your 30DC blogs?  You just need to add a few comments (2-5 paragraphs) under the quoted text and you're done!  Also, Flock's blog editor has much better image-editing capabilities than WordPressDirect.  Instead of doing weird things like typing in %IMAGE% where you want one to appear, you can simply upload your images to your Facebook/Flickr/Picasa account using Flock's built-in image-uploader and then link to them inside the blog-editor in the same way you might do in a Microsoft Word document.

WAY better than using WordPressDirect's upload form ;)  (PS:  I love WPD, I just don't like their blog editor!)

NB: Probably the best reason to blog with Flock is that you don't have to bother with HTML code, you can just select text, and choose to link it, bold it and so on.  It's much easier and faster than doing the HTML yourself which, of course, means you can make more blogs and make more money using the 30DC methods :)

So, without further ado, here's how you do it...

Step 1: Click

Step 2: Click

Step 3: Click

Step 4: Tell Flock Where Your Blog is Hosted

In this step, you want to select "I host my blog, or the service I use is not listed".  Then just type in your WordPressDirect.com address.  This might be your own domain or a subdomain provided by WordPressDirect.com themselves.  Example:



Then click

Now just wait a bit...

...while Flock figures out what kind of blog you have.  It does this automatically for all WordPress blogs.  For other blogs, you may have to do a bit more work but you won't have to worry about that if you're following Ed's lessons.

Step 5: Type in Your Login Details

In most cases, your username will be "admin" and your password will be the same one you used when you created your WordPressDirect.com account.  But, if you can't remember what that was, fear not!  Simply login to your WordPressDirect.com account and...

Click:


On the screen that comes up next, you'll see your login details.  Take them from there and just copy and paste those details into Flock!

Your username and password here:



Should end up here:


Click and you're done!

All in all, this should take you about ONE MINUTE!  If you don't know your WordPressDirect login details, it might take you TWO ;)

Once you've done this, you can simply click each time you want to blog something and start typing! No waiting for your blog to load, no logging in first, nothing :)

And, remember, you can select any text on any web page and then right-click and choose "Blog This" to blog it!  Sweet! :D

Enjoy!  Blogging with Flock is MUCH easier than any other blogging software I've ever used before!<!-- technorati tags begin -->

Tags: blogging, 30 day challenge, thirty day challenge, wordpressdirect.com, easy blogging

<!-- technorati tags end -->