How I Organize My Feeds
Whether you are a part-time blogger or a pro-blogger who makes a full-time living online from your blog, you want to take time on a daily basis to keep up with the latest developments in your niche and other industries. You certainly don’t want to talk about things without being on the top of things in your market. Not knowing what you are talking about is the best way to lose your credibility and damage your blog’s reputation. Finding blogs to read in your niche is not that difficult. There are plenty of lists out there that show you what the top blogs are in each niche. There are plenty of bloggers that create posts about top blogs in different niches. So there is no excuse in finding a handful of blogs to read on a daily basis. Things get a bit more dicey when you are greedy like me. There was a time that I had over 1000 feeds in my “must read” folder. I was never able to catch up with everything in that folder, but it was a nice way to challenge myself.
I realized after a while that one just can’t keep up with that many feeds. Not without sacrificing some other things. As a business owner, I owed it to myself to organize my feeds in a way that would help me get the information I need on a daily basis without forgetting about my core business processes. If you suffer from information and feed overload, you may want to consider switching your feed reader and use one that lets you organize your feeds and get more out of them. Bloglines and Google Reader are both very powerful and worth using if you are a feed junkie. I personally stopped using Bloglines a while ago as Google Reader provided me with more social features, but either solutions works great. How you organize your feeds is going to be the most important part of the process. There are plenty of ways to organize feeds and gather information through your feed reader. I personally classify my feeds under these 6 categories:
- Must Read: these are feeds that have proven themselves over the past when it comes to quality and depth of analysis. These are feeds that I wouldn’t want to miss no matter how busy I am.
- Must Skim: there are some feeds that are not really worth going through all the time. Sometimes they have great articles that you want to read but not all the time. I would skim through these feeds to see if there is anything interesting available. But I wouldn’t spend too much time on them.
- Idea feeds: feeds that inspire me and give me ideas about future products/services and even future blog posts. I usually catch these once every other day.
- Forums: I have added my favorite forums’ RSS feeds to Google Reader as well. That allows me to get people’s questions when they happen. Besides, forums are great places to mine for ideas.
- Alert Feeds: these are the alerts I have setup through Google Alerts. Instead of sending the alerts to my e-mail, I just grab the feed and add it to my reader. It’s easier to manage and doesn’t fill up my inbox. Great for tracking brands, breaking news, and more.
- Wild blogs: these are blogs that have nothing to do with my niche. They are usually out there. We are talking about highly sophisticated tech, programming, psychology, and analytics blogs. I don’t read everything there is here, but they do help me get new ideas once in a while.
When it comes to keeping up with your feeds, you want to focus on quality instead of quantity. You are not going to have time to read blogs all day. That’s not how you run a blog or business. So pick and choose the blogs you read carefully and remove those that usually have similar posts on the same topics. Keeping up with 100s of blogs a day is always nice, but that shouldn’t be your only focus. Not if you are running a serious business.
