Home-Based Business Advice – Collect RSS Feeds
When using social media for your home-based, small, or any business, you need to add value, share content that is interesting. You shouldn’t just jam your sales pitch down your customers’ throats, they’ll stop following you. So, where do you find stuff to share with your niche, and how do you keep it organized while working at home?
Depending on your home company’s objectives, you need to find bloggers, news sites or helpful online resources that would appeal to your audience. For example:
- If you are selling health products, find sites about healthy living
- If you are selling accounting services, look for financial sites with news and tips
- If you are selling pet products, comb through sites about pet care and training
It would be very time consuming to visit each blogger’s website every day. An efficient way to keep up with changing news on their sites, is to set up RSS feeds.
What the heck is an RSS feed? RSS is a news feed on someone’s website or blog, which you subscribe to. It usually stands for Really Simple Syndication, but is also seen as Rich Site Summary. It doesn’t matter to you, as you just look for the RSS acronym and an orange icon with a dot and two curved bars. Sometimes there are different coloured icons or fancy buttons, too.
Easy to manage:
- Set up an RSS reader. I have a Google account, so just use their Google Reader, which is excellent. Other readers include Amphetadesk, FeedReader, and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). Bloglines and My Yahoo also have them.
- Try subscribing. Just for fun, find some sites that you like that have content that gets updated regularly - news, blogs, whatever. Click on the RSS icon, and depending on the site, you will get another window asking you to select what reader you want to use, i.e. Google Reader. Click away, and voila! You are now subscribed to that page.
- Organize your feeds. In Google Reader, you can create folders to keep your feeds in different categories, making it easy to keep track of them. For example, I have folders for Business, Personal, My City, Movies, Technology, and Social Media.
- Review daily. You have to visit your reader to see what is new. You don’t get an email or anything that lets you know when there are new updates from your subscriptions. If you see an article that may appeal to your audience, then you will click into the story, and then share that page’s URL/website address through your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or Linkedin accounts.
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