Creating an RSS Feed Swipe File

This past week Nicole Dean was guest blogging on one of my other blogs and her topic for the week was How To Get Ideas For Your Next Blog Post.

I will be going into more detail on occasion here. Today we will look at this tip.

11. RSS Feed Swipe File.
This idea came from my friend, Susanne of HillbillyHousewife.com – Set up a Google reader account which is a RSS feed reader/aggregator. Then, go and sign up for the RSS feeds for several competing sites. (If you don’t know of any competing sites yet, the feed reader will allow you to search for them.) Then, log into your feed reader any time you need ideas for a blog post. Alternatively, you can log into the feed reader once per week or per month and jot those ideas into your idea notebook for later.

Two things to do here to take advantage of this tip.

1. Set up a Google Reader account
2. Find and add the feed url for a blog to it

Google love them or hate them has some really excellent free tools. One of those that I use regularly is the Reader. Getting it set up is easy.

Open a Gmail account or use your existing account. You may want to have more than one if you are working across various niches so you can keep them separated..

At the top of your Gmail account you can click on Reader.

Once you do that the Reader will open up then you can add the url of the feed by clicking the Add a subscription button.

Then you can either add a search term to find feeds on your topic or add the actual feed url from a blog you wish to follow. This will also work for any rss feed you may wish to add. This can include news feeds, article site feeds or any place else that has an rss feed.

Here is what I got from a search of the term WordPress. You can just click the subscribe button to add each one to your Reader.

 

You can also add the feed url in direct through the Add subscription box. Most sites that have an rss feed will use the feed button or a hyperlink of RSS.

Clicking either the button or the link will usually open up the feed in a browser and you can just copy and paste the url into the add box. You can also find it by right clicking and selecting properties to get the url.

You now have the details so it is up to you to take action and use this technique for blog post ideas.

Mike Paetzold

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