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Web Moves News and Information

27
Jul
2008

How to keep up with the Trends Using RSS

The web is moving quickly in various directions all at once. Opportunities come and go in a snap. If you plan to make money online, you have to be able to keep up. It can be quite intimidating trying to follow every emerging trend, not to mention time-consuming. There are millions of blogs, forums, twitter feeds and the list goes on and on. However, using an RSS aggregator like the Google Reader and a few techniques, monitoring conversations in the web can be fast and easy.

1. Organize your feeds

As time goes on, you’ll discover lots of interesting sites that you’d want to subscribe to. If you just dump them all without any system in your RSS reader, it will quickly turn into chaos. Organize using folders to segregate your work-related feeds from personal interest feeds. Your work-related feeds should further be categorized into either the several niches that you follow, or by first tier and second tier blogs depending on their relevance. Choose what works best for you.

2. Pick the best sites

Select only the most relevant blogs for your purpose – 10-30 is good for starters. Keep in mind that you need to look for content significant to your niche, brand and competitors. However, you don’t have to limit yourself to blogs. For tweets, Summize can be a great source with its fantastic search engine. To listen in to forum conversations about your product, you can use Omgili to look for keywords and then subscribe to the search results.

3. Read only what you need

Separate the wheat from the shaft. If you’re like me, there’s a great temptation to read everything out of curiosity. That’s fine, but it can waste time, which means wasted money, especially if the feeds you’ve subscribed to aren’t that targeted to your niche. Use the search feature of your RSS aggregator to look for articles with pertinent keywords. Read only what you need so that you’ll be able to attend to other aspects of your work. Also, attend to your feeds only twice a day – once in the morning when you start your day, and once when you’re ready to call it a night (of course, you’re free to adjust this depending on your sleeping pattern).

4. Collate and share

Everyday, collect the most interesting feeds you’ve found and share them with your business partners. Listening in on these web-wide conversations is a good way to stimulate your own internal discussions which, hopefully, will give birth to some exciting new ideas for your company.

Do you have any RSS techniques of your own?