Keep Up to Date with Blogs

Blogs are a valuable source of information and opinion and a great way for you as a business owner - no matter what industry you are in - to keep up to date. However, finding and checking all of those blogs might seem like a bit of a chore so let's find out what simple steps we can take to minimise the effort.

Finding the right blogs

Apart from following recommendations and stumbling across the odd blog from day-to-day surfing you can use Google to find the blogs that are related to your industry.

As you might expect it starts with a search through the main Google search page for keywords that best describe your industry. The resulting page will show you normal search results including pages.

However, if you click on the left hand side you'll see that you can filter the results by Blogs only. Have a look through some of these blogs to see if there are any you may wish to follow and that seem particularly useful to you.

Subscribing to the blog

This next part isn't absolutely essential but it will provide you with a less pro-active way of following the blogs that you are interested in. Assuming you have found a blog that you think will be useful and you will enjoy reading you can either see if they offer newsletter updates, Twitter feeds or Facebook links. This will allow you - hopefully - to see when the blog is updated.

Many blogs, however, provide an RSS feed. This is their blog content in coded format that can be read by programs called RSS readers. There are many applications for your browser, PC or smartphone that allow you to view blog updates from all of the blogs you have subscribed to in the order that they are updated. You therefore don't need to miss another update.

Getting Broad Updates

A few weeks ago we blogged about using Google Alerts and here that tool finds a niche. You can specifically request updates via Google Alerts that focus only on blogs. While this won't return only the blogs you are interested in you will get a broad list of results from many blogs which may - or may not - be of interest.

Whichever methods you choose remember to set time aside to keep up with industry best practice and new products and services. Blogs are an excellent way to do that as well as gaining opinions and thoughts on these topics.