This is a follow up from my recent post here. I promised to write about how to more quickly find and follow business blogs that are written by influential people in your industry space.
The initial step in developing and launching a blog strategy for your business is similar to that of launching your product or service. You want to become familiar with the competitive landscape by following blogs for a time.
It will be important for you to quickly ‘scan’ (read) blogs for a couple of weeks in order to determine which ones are the most credible and relevant to your market, clients and prospects.
Secret Weapon for Speed Reading
The secret weapon in ‘quickly scanning blogs’ is using a news reader. Clearly, the news readers work for any site that provides updated ‘content alerts’ using RSS—or the ‘universal feed icon’ (see symbol to the left). (That means the news reader only presents to you the newest articles/content.) You do not have to hunt around on a blog or news site for what is the most recent content.
So, if you decide to purchase a news reader, I recommend FeedDemon—my favorite web tool. Here is the link (it is owned by News Gator). I bought it two years ago for about $30 and it works like a charm. FeedDemon offers a free trial also. I bought it as a download for Windows. I am so not a tech-wiz and it is fabulously easy to use.
The news readers make it very fast for you to scan headlines of the blogs you follow (or any web site with RSS feeds) and only drill down and read the entries for the posts you are interested in.
You set up each blog you wish to follow much like you would book mark favorites in your regular web browser. It is just way faster than using bookmarks because the content is ‘pulled’ to you.
And the important part is with a news reader, you can follow blogs or news when you are ready to devote some time to reading them—not when an email is dumped in your Outlook. So the news and blog updates are all populated and you can quickly scan the center column of your ‘specialized browser’ within the news reader. Here is a list of other news readers.
Here is a more detailed ‘Getting Started: How to Load and use FeedDemon’ how-to article that my partner, Jim Butz, wrote in a PDF file. Let me know if it is helpful. 
(Isn’t this a cool new Adobe PDF icon?)
Download how_to_keep_up_experts_3.pdf
Let me know if a news reader makes it easier for you to follow blogs.
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