Only fools don't use tools - part 3

Only fools don’t use tools - part 3

May 1st, 2008 | by Scott

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I’ve talked about using tools to save you time online twice before (part 1 and part 2), and since today is RSS Awareness Day I thought it was a great time to revisit the idea of using tools wisely to save time, and specifically, the use of RSS Readers.

First, if you’re trying to start a profitable web site, whether your goal is to earn a little extra beer money each week or to build a full time business for yourself, you should be following blogs and news sources that cover your general topic to stay up to date.

The problem with that is you can quickly lose hours of your day going to each site and digging out the latest information. Or worse, you may visit some sites and find there’s nothing new for you there today… that’s wasted time and it does add up.

Here’s where RSS and readers really fill a need. By using an RSS Reader, you can have all of the latest stories from every blog and news site you follow collected in a single place for you, and only the latest stories will be displayed so you won’t waste time looking at anything you’ve already seen or read.

I’ve mentioned this here before, but I follow well over 100 different blogs every day. I also follow several dozen news and trade sites too. It would take me until lunch time every day to actually visit and sort through all of those sites each day if I visited them each individually.

But I use Bloglines and Google Reader instead, and only have to visit 2 sites to get all that information rather then hundreds. And again, because these only show me what I haven’t already looked at in them, I never waste time looking at the same stories twice unless there’s a specific reason I would want to.

I could even reduce that to one site, but I’m a little bit anal about organization and like to keep certain RSS feeds separate, that’s why I use both Bloglines and Google Reader.

Using RSS and RSS Readers, I’m usually able to get through all the sites I follow in under a half-hour each morning, and then through the day I’ll check for any updates here and there, which only takes a couple of moments. It’s a super time saver.

The folks at CommonCraft put a sweet video together showing the advantages and ease of use for utilizing RSS and a reader program, so check it out and then subscribe to my feed and start saving time: