How do I follow someone else’s blog or how do they follow mine?
It’s a question that I get asked all the time so I thought I’d do a quick blog post on how to keep updated with blogs you are interested in.
As an Internet Marketing Consultant I’m very keen for my clients to utilise blogs, but how does a consumer get notified when you put up a new blog post? Good question. Personally I follow and read 7-10 blogs I’m interested in however I don’t have time to go to each one and check out if there is a new post every time I have a few moments.
To follow the blogs I’m interested in use my smartphone (iPhone) and my tablet (iPad) as they allow me to read new posts when I have some spare time. To enable this I use a free App on my phone (Reeder, but there are a fair few to choose from, including Flipboard as of Dec 2011) and a free App on my tablet (Flipboard, brilliant) to synchronise to my Google Reader account. For Android devices try gReader. This sounds hard but it’s incredibly easy, and completely free. Install the App, fire it up, enter your Google login details and your selected blogs will just appear, yes really!
To add blogs go onto Google Reader, then open another tab in your browser and navigate to the blog you want to follow. On the blogs home page copy the URL from the address bar, go back to Google reader, hit the “add a subscription” button in the top left and paste the URL into the box, click the “add” button and it’s done. This is a onetime task and you can add (and remove) as many blogs as you wish.
Current blog posts and any new entries will be consolidated into Google Reader for you to read when you wish. You can of course just use Google Reader on your computer to keep in touch with these blogs but I find when I have spare time I’m not usually in front of a computer so I use my smartphone or tablet.
In addition to this you can syndicate your blog posts out to Facebook profiles, LinkedIn profiles and Twitter automatically which will then notify anyone following or connected to you (assuming their settings allow it) that a new post has been published.
Enjoy!
