Four Hour Work Week posted a great blog post on how to make the best use of RSS and social bookmarking services. Many small business people still don’t use RSS and I think they should. Just look at these points from an RSS pro:

Tips for Using RSS Effectively:

1) Don’t Use Categories
Organizing all your feeds by genre is tempting but will burn you out. It is better to list them all out in a single view and use the “j” and “k” shortcuts [hitting the “j” key move you down, hitting the “k” moves you up] on Google Reader to navigate your feeds. This inserts variety into your daily read and lets valuable material stand out, as opposed to reading 30 posts in a row from the same author.

2) Don’t check it on the weekends
By batching it up and adding a sense of urgency to the process, you’re much less likely to waste time on crap. Be ruthless. If it’s good and you miss it, it will come back to you, I promise.

3) Clean House
You’re in charge. Your time is valuable. You’re too good to put up with someone who phones it in. If your friend told boring or pointless stories, would you call them up in the middle of the day and give them your uninterrupted attention? If an author isn’t delivering consistently, cut them out. If they ever improve enough to be worth reading again, you’ll probably hear about it.

4) If it Piles Up, Throw it Away
If you fall too far behind, don’t dedicate 4 hours to catching up on 1,256 posts. Just click “Mark All As Read” and move on. If you’re utilizing Delicious and StumbleUpon correctly, both later in this article, all the important stuff will come back to you.

That’s all great advice and I really like those last two points. Don’t waste time reading blog posts and information from people who don’t provide you with the best stuff. Life is to short to waste on useless content. Instead, subscribe to the best content and read what is relevant to your business.

For the uninitiated, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. You subscribe to an RSS feed by clicking on the RSS button on a blog and the URL of that feed will be automatically added to your news reader. I recommend Bloglines or Google Reader. Both are Web-based and free.

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you get to choose when you read the information. I recommend setting aside a specific time of day for reading all of your content. Then, information that you want to keep and refer to later should be bookmarked so that you can get back to it when you want. Google Reader has a bookmark feature that lets you place a gold star next to information you want to go back to later. You can also thumbs up the information StumbleUpon or bookmark it on del.icio.us. Whichever way you decide to do it, it makes it easy to save information you want to keep without having to use up your own hard drive space.

Caroline Melberg
Melberg Marketing
Blue Chip Marketing Tips
Small Business Mavericks

Tags: content syndication, information, RSS, time management

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 8:17 am and is filed under Blue Chip Marketing Tips, Networking for Small Business, Tools for Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.