RSS Feeds Helps You Save Time

Written by Andrew Rondeau in search engine optimization advice | 7 Awesome Comments - Add Yours?

rss feeds icon

Of all the millions and millions of websites in the world, 99% of them have one thing in common.

What’s that then?

The RSS Subscription icon (the image on the left).

But only a small percentage of website visitors actually use the RSS service.

Why?

Maybe they are unaware of its’ time saving powers or they don’t know how to ‘make it work’ or they simply don’t know what RSS is.

So I made this simple and short video to show you how easy it is to use the RSS subscription feed…just click to start…

The transcript of the video is below.

Hi, it’s Andrew Rondeau here from webuildyourblog.com.

Of all the millions and millions of blogs and websites out there in the internet world. There is one thing in common or one thing which 99% of them actually have in common and that one thing is the RSS subscription button.

Now, although 99% of all websites and blogs actually have them on their website, not many people actually use it and I think they’re missing out because by subscribing to your favorite websites you can save yourself a huge amount of time and effort.

Coz let’s say you have 10 favorite websites and you visited your favorite one every single day that you looked online to see if there was any, any new post, any new articles on that website.

If you had to look around, it might take you 5 or 10 minutes , then you go on to your next one.

Then you have a look around to see if there’s any new information, new posts. And again it might take you another 5, 10 minutes.

Then you go on to the next one, and the fourth and the fifth, etc, etc.

Now that’s gonna take you a fair amount of time to go through your top ten favorite websites one by one.

Now imagine your favorite 50 or imagine you favorite one hundred websites that you’d like to understand when they’re posting, or when they get an update from each of them. That would seriously take up your time, a huge amount of your time if you were to go to each one individually.

Now if this RSS button, this subscription button and the RSS stands for really simple sindication. With that functionality, you can really, really and significantly reduce the amount of time to view your favorite websites.

Coz what it does is, now I’ll show you how it works in a moment, but what it actually does is that it takes all of your favorite websites and gives you an update in a central area, your central area, of when something new has actually been posted on that site.

So, if you set up your hundred favorite websites, each time one of those websites has a new post that has been added, a new blog has been added or something new has been added. You get an update in your personal reader.

So it saves you time when you go out to each one to see if anything has been updated.

You just go to one central area and you get told whether there’s anything that has been updated from your favorite websites. Now, all you have to do to set this up is first have your reader.

And I, I use Google.

And if I go to the Google homepage. And up here it tells you to, I’m actually signed in at the moment so I’m gonna sign out.

So if you then go into this bit here where it says sign in. And then here, if you haven’t got an account, create an account. And to create an account, it usually takes you 60 seconds. You put in your email address, you choose your password, tell him where you live, you put in a security captcha and accept the terms and conditions, create an account, it’s that simple.

So, if I then, I’ve got an account so I don’t need to set one up. And as I said I use Google for my reader.

So if I log-in to my Google reader, my Google account. So here’s my Google account, it’s logging me in and I go to my account.

And then over here you’ll see that I’ve got a reader, so this is my reader and down on the left hand side here, there are all my favorite websites and when they’re in bold and where there’s a number in brackets, that’s the number of postings which have been put on to that website since I last looked in my Google reader.

So for instance if I look at this particular one, Leadership Turn.

This is his 5, so I click on there and so there’s 5 new postings on that Leadership Turn website since I last looked. And then I can decide from these summaries do I actually want to go and look at any of the postings and I’m going to view, so I’m not going to see any of those and I’m gonna mark them all as red and then Leadership Turn goes unbold and the 5 which was in bracket, it’s as if I’ve read them.

So let’s see, Slacker Manager, there’s lots of new ones. So let’s go look at some of these.

So, Help Wanted: Yours, okay, let’s see what that’s about.

So you open up, so I clicked on this little icon over here and it goes and opens it up, giving effective feedback.

So I’m here, I’m quite interested in that. Now all it does is it opens up the individual page. So I’m now going t the individual page and I can have a look and I might wanna comment, I might wanna gain contact with the owner, whatever.

As you can see the Google Reader enables me to look at all of my favorite websites, one place, nice and easy, nice and quick. Now as you can see, there’s quite a lot of them I haven’t actually updated for quite a while well, since I last looked which is Friday I believe. Which is what, 3, 4 days ago.

So it’s really a nice time-saving tool.

So how do you get your websites into here.

So here’s my, here’s one of my websites. You would click on the subscription button. This is the RSS button, it’s always this icon here. So you get free updates. Then it asks you do you want to put it into what reader do you wanna put it into and mine is ultimately goes to Google, but you can click on here and you can choose others, my yahoo, bloglines, etc, etc.

But I go to Google because that’s where I got my reader account and you subscribe and you say, add to Google reader and it’s as simple as that. And webuildyourblog, 5, so since I looked at webuildyourblog, I’ve just imported this so it’s just gonna be the latest 5.

This guy here, John Gordon, I’m not, I don’t subscribe to his RSS and his blog but I’ll just show you another example.

So, you subscrive, you click on the icon. It says where’d you wanna, which reader’s you wanna use, I wanna use Google, added to my Google reader coz I’m logged in and then it gives me John Gordon’s, that particular websites latest postings.

And if I come down here, it should be added here and here we are, there’s a 10. So it’s as simple as that.

And that can save you a huge amount of time.

So, just to recap, if you go to any particular website, any website. Click on the subscribe button. Create a Google reader account and then all of your favorite websites postings and updates will go into a central area. You can log-in to your central area once a day have a look / see what’s happening, once a week have a look-see what’s happening and that will save you a huge amount of time and that’s how the RSS works. It is really easy, it is really simple and it can save you a huge amount of time.

So, try it out, good luck , let me know how you get on.

Thanks, see you soon. This is Andrew Rondeau from webuildyourblog.




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7 Responses to RSS Feeds Helps You Save Time
  1. Coryelle Kramer~Animal Communicator

    Andrew, that video on the RSS feed was a winner very informative! The RSS subscriptions does indeed save me a whole lot of time. Thanks for the post

    Reply
  2. Andrew
    Twitter:

    Coryelle,

    Thanks for the ‘thanks’. It does save me personally a huge amount of time. Shame more people don’t use it, especially as it is free.

    Andrew

    Reply
  3. Simply Ridiculous

    Thanks for the video.. It is really good info for RSS-ignorant people.. :) It’s surprising how many people are still in the dark about what actually RSS is..

    Reply
  4. andrew
    Twitter:

    Simply Ridiculous,

    You are so right…somehow we need to let everyone know about its powers!

    Andrew

    Reply
  5. ThatsBlog.com

    Thanks for your submission to the Thirty-Eighth edition of the Blog Carnival: Blogging. Your post has been accepted and its live:

    http://thatsblog.com/blog-carnival-blogging/blog-carnival-blogging-thirty-eighth-edition

    -ThatsBlog.com

    Reply
  6. Kai

    Some people don’t even care about RSS subscriptions. I, for one, do not care at all. I just care that people are finding my site through search engine and clicking ads.
    .-= Kai@seo blog´s last blog ..Keywords That Sell =-.

    Reply
    • Andrew Rondeau
      Twitter:

      Kai

      Did you actually watch the video? It had little about RSS subscriptions – it was about saving time and being more efficient!

      Andrew

      Reply
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