How to use RSS feeds to save you time.

Technology has certainly made our lives easier but at the same time it somehow has made our lives busier.  Marketing your business online is a very cost effective way to market your business and using social networking sites to drive traffic to your website is a must.  The problem is that while this is cost effective one of the biggest issues with social media management and marketing your business online is that it is extremely time consuming.  Before you know it you’ve spent 2 to 3 hrs of your time online doing different things and getting sidetracked.

If you have a blog and you are distributing your blog posts in various social networking sites you want to save yourself time by not having to manually do this every time you publish a blog.  What you want to be able to do is publish your blog post and have the post distributed automatically for you to all the social networking sites you are linked up to.  I’m going to show you a neat trick that is going to make your life just a little easier by using RSS Feeds.

What is an RSS feed?

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and this is exactly what it is!  RSS allows you to take a specified URL link address and set it up to distribute to all selected distribution channels you choose so every time you publish a blog  or article post it automatically updates on all networks publishing your latest blog post.

Now you may ask, “where is this so called RSS feed”?

Generally the RSS feed is a big orange button which looks very much like the image on the left.
When you click on that button it navigates to a page looking like the image below and you will find your RSS feed in the address bar as shown below.

Ok so now that I know where my RSS feed URL is, what do I do with it?

Copy the RSS URL feed and link it to your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts suing a tool like Twitterfeed. This will keep all your social networking sites updated with your latest post.

You can also grab another sites RSS feed and add it to your Twitterfeed to share content on selected social  networking sites.  This would form part of your content strategy and it also gives you content to share with your audience who might find it useful and interesting.

Any questions on social media assistance, contact @romanythresher via Twitter.