This blog provides helpful marketing advice in how to reach consumer with your blog, and starts out with a short introduction to feedreaders. Consumers can find your blog through their feedreader!
Wouldn't it be great if you could go to one place and be able to access all your news and blogs in one fell swoop? Such a huge development has come to pass. Feedreaders are unbelievable!
After attending Dustin Luther's amazing seminar Finding Relevance on the Internet Wednesday, I have been motivated to get my feedreader www.google.com/reader set up as my personalized "newspaper". What is a "feedreader"? Wikipedia defines a feedreader as "an aggregator or news aggregator or feed reader is client software that uses a web feed to retrieve syndicated web content such as weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites".
Most feedreaders are free, and very simple to use. Google's is an optimal example. To set up your free feedreader, go to www.google.com/reader. Click on "create an account now" on the right of your screen. Follow the directions to set up your account. Once your account is set up, go to www.google.com/reader. On the left of your screen, you will see a line that says "Add subscription" and next to it, "browse". You can enter titles by subject, or if you have a blog already in mind that you would like to add, enter it in.
To know which link to select to add to your feedreader, look for the one ending in "RSS" in the web address. RSS refers to the web feeding technology utilized.
And...... this is the best part! ActiveRain blogs can be subscribed to via feedreader!!! This means that clients can find you while doing a search to subscribe to blogs on topics you cover. Ex: Laguna Beach Real Estate. Pretty cool, huh?
Some other helpful tidbits:
- Your blog will be classified by its title under the browse section of GoogleReader. Keep your title concise and to the point. and keep in mind how a consumer may conduct a search. Make your title something a client/subscriber to your blog would enter into the search box. (Your blog title is something you set on ActiveRain, not on Googlereader. "Title" refers to whatever you name your blog on ActiveRain.)
- Reading up on other blogs will keep you informed on what's happening in the market. This propagates your own blogs, acting as food for the fodder...
- Have some fun and browse for blogs to subscribe to in other areas you are interested in. This can include hobbies, sports, politics, etc.
Excitingly, when I entered in "Laguna Beach Real Estate" to see who came up in google's list, my ActiveRain blog came up at the very top of the list! Check it out below! More on FeedReaders from Dustin Luther Jeff Dowler's Blog on the LA/Long Beach Seminar, and Jeff's brief synopsis of what was convered in the Seminar
when ActiveRain first launched (or shortly thereafter) Jon and I were playing with the google feed reader (or what it was then, it may have evolved a bit since) but I mistakenly grabbed the feed from activerain as a whole. Five million blogs later and I'm scared to go back and see what's in there. I hope they have a "select all" button so I can clear it out.
Jon is always showing me this "cool new stuff" to the point I can hardly keep up. I probably have 1000 different accounts at a 1000 really cool places but he is always giving me new things to the point I can't ever keep up with the one he gave me the day before. Gotta love your husband!!!!!
I need a virtual assistant for it all. Their title would be "Organizer of Cool things Jon sent me"
Bob
Bob, crack me up!
I think that's because as Jon finds new things, he screens out what most valuable to him and continually refines it... so that he doesn't have 1000 things he keeps up with simultaneously. (Good gracious, that just sounds exhaustive!!!)
Sara thanks for the post and info about GoogleFeedReader. I will check it out. Don't think I've been there before, at least I don't remember being there.
the easier it gets to customize feedburners and readers, the most significant online news will become compared to print media.
Hi Cynthia!!
It looks more complicated than it is, when you go to google.com/reader and try to set it up. It is marvelously brilliant, though. Let me know if you have any glitches setting it up, even if you decide to do it months from now. I'd love to help!
Sharon, I think so!
The papers I read currently are all small local Laguna Beach publications that are not available online. I also read a few scholarly journals for my own interest, also not available online, and not very practical if they were, due to their length! Everything else, I keep up with online. Online methods are so quick and consise! Now I can spend more time blogging... ehehehe ;)
Hi Tim,
I'm not certain about stats. However, my uncertainty is not that they don't exist (Google tracks everything!) but how to specifically access them.
Hi Elena,
Glad to have helped! :)
When you say to someone "Do a Google Search", I am not sure if they even know what google reader is?
Robert B. McArtor, REALTOR / Auctioneer http://www.MarylandHOMESTeam.com/ and http://www.MDAuctionSales.com/
Baltimore, Harford County, Cecil County Real Estate
Sara - Thanks for this very informative blog. Quick question - how do I change the title on Active Rain?
Also, I went to my own blog on AR, copied the URL and then added it as a subscription within Google Reader. The one I pasted did not contain an "RSS" at the end. Yet, it now appears on the reader. Did I do something incorrectly?
Hi Robert!
Good point! Many people don't know what a "feed reader" is, much less Googgle's feed reader. In attempt to clarify my past ambiguity:
In a standard google search, ActiveRainers receive the benefit of ranking high in search results due to organic search engine optimization strategies employed by ActiveRain. Anyone using and blogging on ActiveRain automatically gets these benefits. They are not benefits that can be turned on or off; they are built intrinsically into the ActiveRain platform.
Because Google operates one of the more popular feed readers, this also means that ActiveRainers benefit from the included high rankings in a Google's Feed Reader blog search. So, if I were an avid Google Feed Reader user, and one day I decided that I wanted to move to St Louis, a method I might employ would be doing a search for "St Louis Real Estate" in Google's Feed Reader Search. From the results, I would subscribe to a several of the blogs that look interesting to me. And when it finally came time to buy, it makes sense naturally I would call the agent writing all these blogs I'm reading... It is in this fashion that having a high ranking in Google's Feed Reader search is beneficial to one's business, additionally to the included benefits of a high ranking due to being a contributing member of ActiveRain. High rankings in a general Google Search and high rankings in Google's feed reader search are both intrinsic to being an ActiveRainer.
The difference between a feedreader user and a non feedreader user is merely that regular readers to your blog who utilize a feedreader will receive your blog directly in their blog list once they subscribe, whereas those who don't use a feed reader will have to open up the page for your blog manually.
Timothy,
Another thought:
It's hard (impossible?) to know who finds you due to a googlereader blog search. To the agent/loan officer, it merely appears that the client contacted them through ActiveRain. I don't know if anyone at Google tracks those numbers... or in any way that they can provide them to random bloggers interested in the particular stats...
Hi Kathy, I will email you directly about how to change your blog title. :)
Sara
Sara,
I did this, this is really cool all my blogs in one spot Thanks for the tip.
Good Day!!
Duayne
Sara thanks for the tip
I just need to find time to work on it
Eddy
Wow Sara - this is cool stuff. I just went into my google account and set it up. Am I suppose to do anything connected to my AR Blog? Or are you just making the point that subscribers can find us through googlereader via active rain?
I've used google reader for a LONG time. I like that you can click on the RSS button, and if a site doesn't have one, you can enter the URL into google reader. Google offers such cool stuff for free. Only problem is - not enough time to read all the feeds.