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Save Time with Subscriptions

March 17, 2007

As a small business owner, you probably don’t have a lot of time to keep up-to-date on all the latest trends and news. However, as a small business owner, it is a must to stay on top of your industry or the competition will pass you by! I am going to tell you how you can make the most of your time with free subscriptions to your favorite online publications.

To start, you will need a feed reader. A feed reader is a program (online or installed on your computer) that brings together alll the headlines from your selected sources for you to read in one place. It includes the headline, either full text or an excerpt, and a link for you to read more about this topic. Some online examples are My Yahoo!, NewsGator, and Google Hompage. I use a program called NewsFire for my Mac. There are many for a PC as well, including the popular email program Thunderbird and the new Internet Explorer 7. You can find one by going to download.com and searching for "RSS" or "RSS reader". (They are rated there to help you find the best one!)

Once you have chosen your feed reader, it is time to start adding your feeds. You can gets feeds from pretty much any news source or online publication on the web today. To add your feed, look for the little orange icon that appears on the top right of this page, an orange button that says "XML", or an orange button that says "RSS".

Alternatively, you can subscribe to many feeds in the form of email, as you see in my sign up box to the top right. Many people prefer the reader subscription, however, as it keeps your inbox clearer if you subscribe to many feeds. (I have 22 in my reader right now, and I seem to find a new one weekly.)

How do you find new feeds? I just look for the icon if I am on a page I like. For example, if I did a Google search for a particular subject that I deal with frequently, and ended up on a page where they had really good information, I would probably add that feed to my reader so I could see what other tips they had down the road.

Hopefully this article has given you some information about how you can stay current on trends in your industry and in small businesses while not using up a huge chunk of your time. To further save you time, I am going to include a list of suggested feeds for small businesses to get you started with seeding your feed reader. After you have chosen and set up your reader, come back here to click on these links and add them to your program:

Note: These links take you to the page where you can sign up for the feed, not the feed itself.

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