I mentioned a few years ago wrote about how I follow over 500 blogs every day. That post has the details of how I do it, but it really comes down to two things:
- Devote time to keep up with them.
- Have a system to help you out.
That older post will show you the system, and the time factor is up to you. I try to allow spots of time throughout the day to keep up with them, then some longer time each week to dig deeper into some of the more compelling posts.
Finding blogs
Once you have things set up you need to find some blogs to follow. Here are some ways to find items to add to your Feedly.
Icons
Look for the orange RSS icon, seen on the right. Clicking on that icon will typically lead you to the RSS feed of the site you’re currently on. While the feed itself will look ugly in your browser, you can copy the link to their feed and add it to Feedly.
Just Guess
The second best way is to simply guess. If you’re on a blog or news page of any kind, there is a 90% change of having an RSS feed behind it. Just copy the link to that page into Feedly and it will typically be able to find the feed for it.
Dig for one
There are many other custom feeds you can generate yourself. For example, WordPress sites automatically create separate feeds for each category of posts. Suppose you’re on the GreenMellen site and just want a feed of our SEO-related posts. Head over to this URL:
http://www.greenmellenmedia.com/category/seo-blog/
Then just put “/feed” at the end of it, like this:
http://www.greenmellenmedia.com/category/seo-blog/feed/
In WordPress this also works for tag pages and author pages, though fewer blogs use those.
Another good example is with craigslist. If you’re on there, perhaps you want to keep an eye on any new antiques that are added. Start by browsing to that section, then look for the orange RSS button at the very bottom on the right.
Better yet, you can do a search on craigslist and get a feed for the search results. For example do a search for the hot NES Classic, and you’ll see that same orange RSS link at the very bottom.
I tend to only pull craigslist feeds occasionally, as you will typically have a lot of items pouring into your Feedly.
Start with mine
While I have around 550 sites in my Feedly, many of those are blogs that you wouldn’t be interested in (my local weather, blogs from our kid’s schools, some of our clients, etc), but there around 400 that might be worth considering. I’ve saved those into this OPML file for you download and add to your own Feedly. It’s full of hundreds of tech blogs that I’ve added over the years, with a few things to look out for:
Dead: Some of the blogs are certainly dead. I’m not sure which ones are, but it doesn’t matter — this is the beauty of RSS. You’ll simply never see any posts from them, so it’s not like they’ll really be in the way.
Crazy: Some of them in there are very busy; Lifehacker produces roughly a dozen posts per day, and sites like TechCrunch average almost 40/day. You may want to remove some of the busy ones like that so you can get a handle on things.
It takes effort to keep up with a large number of feeds, but it’s a great way to keep yourself informed without having to visit dozens of different sites every day.
What are some of your favorite blogs to follow?
One of my favorite blogs is Hubspot’s marketing blog, which is a pretty generic one. As a copywriter and marketing professional, I find that their studies and tips are as current as possible, and I enjoy implementing their suggestions into my clients’ social media, website content and email marketing efforts.