OK, I need to be upfront and honest with you. Recently, I had no idea what those little orange buttons on websites were all about.

Until I viewed an How To Use RSS Feeds video to learn how powerful they were to help people like me, “information hogs.”

In one sentence, an RSS feed is like having a subscription to your favorite gossip magazine — expect it’s totally free.

If you’d like to keep up-to-date with new information we post on this site, you can subscribe to our RSS feed.

What is RSS And How Do do I use it?

View video on how I use google feedreader

RSS is a way of having people that you trust automatically send information to you… without having to go to their website. Using this free feature has saved me hours of having to check 20+ websites to see if they have updated. When the site is updated, the new content is automatically sent to you – in the form of a feed.

It’s feed takes the form of a secretary, like a virtual assistant who creates personalized executive summaries each week

In order to read the feed, you’ll need a feedreader. There are a number of free feedreaders. The one I use is Google Feedreader. Once you’ve got that, anytime you see that orange icon on a website, click it, and you’ll subscribe yourself to that website.

7 Reasons to Subscribe to Ms. Piggies’ Smokehouse

1. You never have to check the site for updates again, and you get the latest and greatest first.
2. It’s totally free.
3. Having subscribers means something–the content works, and using e-mail or RSS saves you wasted visits. More results in less time.
4. Exclusive content and competitions–from cutting-edge gadgets to round-the-world tickets–are often limited to subscribers only. If you want the rarest opportunities, subscribing is the way to go.
5. Your info will never be shared with anyone. I hate spammers as much as you do. Scout’s honor.
6. Subscribing is worth testing for a few days just to experience it. Decide you prefer visiting? Just unsubscribe with one click and you’re back at the campfire.
7. Subscribers are smart and hot.

Exceeding Expectations,

Kendall Matthews, The Barbecue Apostle ™

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OK, I need to clear something up…

I get some of my information from many different sources, including friends, professors, and occasionally — yes — even the much maligned marketing gurus.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Keep Reading For Even More RSS Knowledge

According to Timothy Ferris, author of “The Four Hour Work Week” , in a digital world, the race goes not to the person with the most information, but the person with the best combination of low-volume and high-relevancy information. The person with the least inputs necessary to maximize output.

What if you had hundreds of people with similar interests filtering for you? An army of attention gatekeepers? Bottom-up instead of top-down information distillation?

Here’s an except from Ryan Holiday article “12 Filtering Tips for Better Information in Half the Time: RSS, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon”

RSS—Really Simple Syndication

This comes as a shock to everyone in the tech crowd, but most people don’t use RSS. If you don’t use it, you should start. It can fundamentally simplify your online life.

…Rather than browsing the web for what you need and getting distracted by the irrelevant but interesting, RSS essentially gives you your own personal newspaper with carefully selected content.

Here a general rule of thumb – The 70% Surfing Rule: if you surf vs. subscribe, assume you will spend at least 70% of your online time consuming interesting instead of actionable information, and 70% of the time, you won’t return to the task you initially set out to complete.

RSS is the first but casual line of defense in your war for efficient information consumption.

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.

The Bottom Line

…RSS is your first line of defense. You pick the sites that deliver quality content and are informed when they’re updated. No need to live and die by it–treat it like scanning the newspaper headlines…

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Tagged as: google feedreader, rss feeds