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78%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

I’m a blog feedaholic. I just took a quiz that told me so. But, it just told me something that I already knew. I currently subscribe to about 49 feeds ranging over lot of different topics. In the past it was closer to 110 feeds. How did I keep track of it all? I tell you, it wasn’t easy. As the number of feeds grew, I had trouble keeping up with the posts it sometimes took between a 45 minutes to an hour and a half to keep up with the reading. I’ve finally got control over my feeds using some simple techniques. While you may not have 110 or even 49 feeds to read every day, if your blog reading time is limited, you can use these techniques to catch up and keep up.

1. Prune the feeds- The first step is to just cut down the sheer number of blog subscriptions. If a blog isn’t educational, informative, or entertaining you should axe it. Here’s how I decided to get rid of a blog feed:

* Blogs that posts too often- one blog actually made 15 to 20 long posts a day! Getting rid of this subscription freed up a lot of time…and I honestly didn’t miss it after it was gone.

* Blogs that posts too little- True, there wasn’t much to read, but in most cases what I did read wasn’t very compelling either

* Blogs that appeared to repeat what other blogs posted- I really only need to read it once.

2. Reorganize your reading schedule- I took the remaining feeds and set up a schedule of when I would read them.

* Daily- These blogs usually provide daily up to date information that I like to keep up with. So I read out of this category every day.

* Every Tuesday and Thursday- These are blogs that I like to check regularly, but they aren’t as urgent as the daily category. These blogs I read twice a week.

* Weekends- The rest of the feeds go here, they’re mostly blogs that only update once or twice a week. Since they contain nothing really urgent I can read them at my leisure on the weekends

Reorganizing my reading schedule cut down the time it takes me to read my feeds from an hour to fifteen minutes a day on the weekdays, and a half hour on the weekends.

3. Have a process for adding new feeds- If you’re reading blogs, you’re likely to run across more blogs that you may be interested in. Once you’ve got your reading schedule under control, you need a process in which you can check out new blogs without throwing off your reading schedule. When my blog reading was out of control, I was scared to add any new ones because I could barely keep up as it was. But now, I’ve created a label called “New Blogs” and put this label on all of the new blogs I subscribe to. I read out of the “New Blogs” category only after I’ve ready all my blogs for the day and if I have some time to spare. If after a while I like what I’m reading, I’ll categorize it under daily, tuesdays and thursdays, or weekends. If I find that it doesn’t interest me, I’ll unsubscribe. This keeps posts from new blogs I’m testing out from getting in the way of more important blogs and it.

4. Review your feeds on a regular basis- Remember that you still have to reevaluate how useful your blog subscriptions are on a regular basis. Your interests change, blogs change, the time you have to read blogs may change. I have a label called the “chopping block” if I feel that a blog is coming to the end of it’s usefulness, I put the “chopping block” label on it. If the next time I read that blog I don’t find something compelling…it gets deleted. Don’t be scared to unsubscribe from a feed. There are over 4 million blogs out on the Internet after all.

So that’s how I’ve tamed the feed beast…at least temporarily. :)