Managing Your RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are really really convenient. You may know what they are, and you may even already have an RSS feed reader like Google Reader - aggregating several or more RSS feeds from your favorite sites. If you’re still a bit sticky with RSS, or you’re not clear on some fundamentals for making better use of this ultra convenient tool, the following article will cover the bases. From what, why, and how; to some concepts and best practices for organization and more effective use.

What is RSS, and Why Do People Use It?

The web is great. The web is really really big though. Their are many cool websites and blogs you’d like to keep up on, but not always as much time as any of us would like.

Bookmarking the memorable and valuable sites you come across is a great way to save the pages and websites that you’d like to remember.

But it’s time consuming to constantly go and check on your bookmarked websites, wouldn’t it be great if you could just automatically receive updates when your favorite sites published new content?

Well... you can! ---- > RSS (= Really Simple Syndication) lets you do just that. RSS feeds spit out the published content for a site in a simple XML format and allow users to keep track and stay up with the latest blogs and articles from their favorite sites.

How To Use RSS

Its really simple.

1. First make sure you have a google reader account, (or whatever you prefer) basically, just make sure you have a gmail account setup and you can setup your google reader account.

2. Anytime you come across a site you would like to receive updates from, look for the little RSS symbol, and click on it.

It usually looks something like this...

The syndicated content will now automatically appear in your google reader - feed aggregator!

This is really all there is to the setup and use of RSS feeds.... But understand that you’re constant collection of cool new sites can start to add up, and too much of a good thing CAN turn into a bad thing.

If you’ve already read my article on (staying up on your market) then you understand the importance of managing a simple workflow, staying steady and consistent with checking these channels, and utilizing them in a targeted way so you are not bouncing all over the place and getting distracted.

RSS feeds are one of those things that can get messy and hard to keep organized. This can lead to a loss of time through endless distractions, cluttered content thats lost its relevance, and reckless rabbit hole chases...

So what’s the solution?

Managing your RSS Feeds

As we mentioned, you are using an RSS feed reader, which aggregates your feeds into one self-contained place. To keep a clean and relevant compilation of the content across the web that matters to you, a little bit of practicality should be applied to our systematic processes.

Prioritizing

You don't need, nor do you have time to have RSS feeds on every topic you are even remotely interested in, so it only makes sense that you narrow this down by prioritizing the most important topics and subject areas that you are going to monitor.

This should lead your thought process into forming a clear idea of what is important to you and why.

You may be interested in the latest news in the highly blogged about world of social media, and you be want to follow all the news of a particular sports team, as well as keep tabs on the latest within your industry.

Selecting

Make sure to choose topic specific sources that fulfill a need on your priority list, and be clear on what you are looking for from the blog or website.

Filtering

Regularly evaluate, and review to keep your feeds under check and not piling up. Blogs that consistently miss the mark on what you were looking for should probably be unsubscribed from.

Organizing You RSS Channels

One convenient way to keep your feeds tidy and cohesively grouped together is to create folders for each topic.

Some best practices for using folders to organize your RSS feeds are:

Organize into folders by priority.

Stick to your guns. if you find a blog you REALLY want to subscribe to, then let another one go.

Remember… info overload is the enemy.

For those of you that use google reader,

Heres a quick video on how to organize RSS feeds in google reader… http://www.ehow.com/video_4431644_organizing-feeds-google-reader.html