Let’s face it, as bloggers and business owners we are busy.
We value our time because we understand it isn’t a renewable resource, and every moment counts in terms of success and fulfillment.
Productivity is one of the most important practices all of us needs to improve on, and having a good rss reader can greatly improve our use of time, increase our traffic, and help us become more successful in our endeavours.
I’m going to talk to you about five important factors our rss reader can help us improve.
Topic idea’s and research
Whether you’re having a dry spell (writers block) or you’re looking for your next blog topic to research, having a good list of sites related to your niche in your rss will not only keep you informed, but help insure that you always have an interesting topic and perspective to write about.
It’s easy to feel like you’ve written every idea and topic you can think of.
Being able to pull up a list of helpful blog posts and topics from your rss is a great way to help keep you refreshed with new ideas.
Choose a variety of good sites to follow and you will always find great tips, tools, and resources you can use and share with your audience.
Building Relationships
If you really enjoy a particular blog or even just a guest post contributor your rss reader can keep you informed when the next post comes out.
You might find yourself inspired by someone you’ve never heard of and that can help open the door to building more relationships with like-minded people in your field.
It gives you the ability to hear new voices, especially on blogs that have many different guests writing posts.
And keeps you from missing out on posts from your favorite authors, which gives you more opportunities to communicate, comment and build relationships.
When you only have a few minutes to spare you can save the articles you want to read for later and delete the rest.
More time to focus on relationship building = more success.
Promotions
Some websites like to new offer promotions or discounts on the things that they sell.
You can keep yourself aware of any promotions going on by being able to quickly browse your rss.
No more guess-work or having to visit the site frequently.
If one of your favorite websites likes to run challenges, social gathering events, and Q&A sessions you save time by viewing it through your rss instead of have to go to the website and search for the posts..
Traffic Generation and SEO
Blog commenting, social events, and guest post opportunities are great ways to increase traffic.
By now I’m sure you can figure out that your rss reader can be very useful.
Every time a great post comes out you can easily go to it through your rss and post a comment on your insights about that post, which can garner additional click-through traffic and help you build links as well.
(Remember you’re commenting to contribute value not just build links.) Don’t spam!
When social events and guest posting opportunities become available it can provide a great way for you to share your ideas and build your authority and notoriety which helps you grow your audience.
Saves you a lot of time
Just as looking at your analytics every five minutes ends up taking away considerable time and emotional energy away from your main goals.
Opening new browsers, typing in websites, googling topics and searching for posts you may have missed can also consume a lot of time.
Following websites that are truly important to you in your rss is not only much quicker than manually going to each site, in some cases you’ll find similar post topics on several websites and can choose to read the one that seems most relevant to you and ignore the rest.
Or maybe you’ll see a topic that you have already learned about and can save the time and effort it would have taken to go to that site to find out the same thing your rss reader could have told you.
What ideas do you have for using your rss reader? Has it helped you become more productive and if so how?