Part 3 – How to Set-up a Feed Reader Page in Your Internet Browser

Welcome to our final post in How I Love to Follow A Blog, Let Me Count the Ways, How to Set-up a Feed Reader Page in Your Internet Browser. In our previous posts talked about setting up internet browser bookmarks, how to subscribe to an RSS feed, and how to configure your email application to accept RSS feeds. In this post we will share with you how to set-up a feed reader page in your internet browser. Google offers a free reader service that is simple to use and very effective Follow these instructions to set-up your own Google Reader page.

What does Google Reader do? Google Reader constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content. Whether a site updates daily or monthly, you can be sure that you won’t miss a thing. New content comes to your Google Reader when it’s posted, so you don’t need to visit individual sites. Plus, Reader keeps track of which items you’ve read, so you only see unread items when you come back. If there’s a dark blue border around an item, Reader is marking that item as read. Google Reader displays all of your favorite sites in one convenient place. It’s like a personalized inbox for the entire web!

Use Google Reader on any computer. You can access your Google Reader account from any computer with online access. Whether you’re at home, at work or abroad, your subscriptions stay with you.

Ready to set up your own Google Feed Reader? You can set up your free Feed Reader page in Google at http://www.google.com/reader.

Google also offers a quick Google Feed Reader video tutorial to demonstrate this process.

Once there, Google will ask you to set up an account, using your email address as your user name and a password of your choice. After your account is set-up, you will see a page that looks like the picture below:

To add a feed to this page, click on the “ + Add a Subscription” icon in the upper left hand corner. You will be prompted to add the URL addresses of the blog you wish to follow. The subscription folder in the picture above shows all the blogs that I subscribe to, as well as how many new posts or “feeds” have been sent to my subscription folder.

It’s easy to see how Google’s Feed Reader page is like “one-stop shopping” to keep up with all the blogs you follow!

4 Fabulous Ways to Follow Our 2¢!

So you checked out our blog and you think it is really great and has important advice for your business. Now you want to follow it on a regular basis, but we both know you are just going to get too busy and forget to come back and see what we have to say next week…. There has to be an easier way.

Lucky for us there is. Actually there are 4 primary ways to follow a blog on a regular schedule.

1. Internet Browser Bookmarks. Simply bookmark your favorite blogs in your browser, then pick one day a week and check out each blog to see what is new.
2. Subscribe to an RSS feed. Most blogs have a little orange button that says RSS. This will put a notification in your browser tool bar that this blog has a new posting, and a link to read the post.
3. Configure your Email application to accept RSS feeds. Each email application is slightly different but the basic concept and process is the same for each application.
4. Set up a Feed Reader page in your internet browser. Google offers a free feed reader service that is simple to use and very effective.

In the next few weeks we will discuss each option in more detail. Stay tuned!