Do you find you don’t have enough time to keep up with your favorite blogs?
Is your email Inbox overflowing from being oversubscribed to too many newsletters?
What if you could get more organized, cut down on the time you spend cleaning out your Inbox and take some of those articles you found and share them on your favorite social media channels?
Do you think you could focus more on your business?
We definitely think so!
In fact, that’s why we recommend Feedly to all of the businesses we work with.
In this article, you’ll learn how to use Feedly to save yourself time, consume more content, and stay on-top of what is happening in your industry.
What is Feedly?
Feedly is a news-aggregation tool.
Instead of subscribing to multiple websites, blogs or podcasts and having to go to each place to read or listen to the content, you can bring everything to you!
If a website you read provides content in an RSS format (Real Simple Syndication), you can add it to Feedly.
When you want to read it, all you have to do is open Feedly from the web, desktop or use their mobile app.
When you do this, you’ll be able to see new articles published by your favorite blogs and websites.
If you find something you want to save or share, Feedly provides multiple ways for you to do that.
You can share it on Facebook, add it to Hootsuite, Buffer or even clip and save an article to Evernote to read later.
There are two types of Feedly accounts, a free version and a pro version (which costs less than $7 per month).
Here is a breakdown on what is included.
We use Feedly Pro because it integrates with Evernote and Buffer, two tools that help save us time and make it easy to share content in seconds.
Download Feedly
How to Use Feedly
Once you sign-up for a Feedly account, you’ll want to start organizing your content.
Here are some ways on how you can use Feedly to help you start to organize and share your favorite content.
Note: it might take some extra time at the beginning to get everything setup how you want it.
The good news is that once you have Feedly setup, you won’t have to bounce back and forth between your email Inbox and your web browser.
Instead, you can just launch Feedly and read and share your favorite content from anywhere!
Let’s take a look at some tips to help you get the most out of Feedly.
Transcription Services by GMR Transcription
1. Create Categories in Feedly
To help organize your information, we recommend creating different categories.
For example, we use the following categories:
- Social media blogs
- Marketing resources
- Apple blogs
- News
- Competitors
- New movies on Netflix
- And so on
Instead of going to each individual website, we can go to each category and see what’s new on our favorite sites.
Then if we find something worth sharing, we can quickly share it using our favorite social tools.
Alternatively, you can also create shared collections.
With shared collections, you can create a category of your favorite blogs and then share them with anyone!
For example, I have a curated list of my favorite social media blogs that I read regularly.
By making this list a shared collection, I can add value for readers looking for this type of information by sharing my collections with them.
2. Clean-up Your Inbox
Is your Inbox overflowing with email newsletters and other junk?
Instead of subscribing to every website or blog, consider adding sites to Feedly instead.
Not only will this clean-up your Inbox, you can then prioritize which blogs you definitely want to receive emails from.
Then move everything else to Feedly. No more mess!
3. Create Hashtags From Categories
Using categories in Feedly can help you organize your favorite websites and blogs.
It can also help when sharing your content too!
For example, if you create a category in Feedly called “social media,” when you go to share it in Buffer, you’ll also have a hashtag of #socialmedia added.
Note: You may need to go into Feedly preferences and turn this feature on.
Category names get turned into hashtags when shared through services such as Buffer
4. Name Your Feeds Using a Twitter ID
Name your blogs using their Twitter handle to make it easy to share
Do you want a quick way to tag someone on Twitter from Feedly?
Save yourself time when you find something you want to share from Feedly by naming the blog using their Twitter username.
This way you won’t have to go look-up that websites Twitter username when you share their content and want to mention them in a tweet.
5. Feedly for Mobile
Whenever you are learning how to use Feedly, one of the first things I always recommend is to download the free Feedly Mobile app.
Not only does it make using Feedly on your mobile device a breeze, it can save you a ton of time.
For example, every morning, rather than check my email Inbox or launch the Feedly desktop app, I launch Feedly on my mobile device and can quickly scan and share the latest headlines.
If I find something I want to save for later, I can clip it to Evernote, Buffer it, add it to Hootsuite or share it on my favorite social network.
6. Use Feedly Shortcuts
Did you know, Feedly has its own collection of keyboard shortcuts.
You can use them to move between articles, quickly jump between categories you’ve created, save items for later, clip to Evernote and more!
By using Feedly shortcuts, you can save yourself time when going through content you’ve added to Feedly.
7. Tag Articles
When you’re learning how to use Feedly, you might want to consider tagging your articles.
This way you can quickly group your favorite content together.
Tagging is also helpful because you can use it in conjunction with other services such as IFTTT to help you automate tasks.
For example, you can setup a recipe in IFTTT so that when an item is tagged with a certain keyword in Feedly, it is automatically tweeted out. You can view that recipe here.
8. Quickly Share Content
If you find a quote or passage you want to share, you can highlight the item in Feedly to share it.
This is a great shortcut in Feedly and can help you quickly schedule out your favorite quotes on your social media channels.
9. Incorporate IFTTT
Earlier, I mentioned how you could use Feedly tagging to tweet out articles.
In addition, there are hundreds of ways to use IFTTT to help you save articles in Feedly.
Here are some ways to save articles in Feedly. In addition to these, be sure to look into using IFTTT for Feedly.
There are a lot of very useful recipes to help increase your productivity and efficiency.
10. Add the Feedly Google Chrome Extension
When learning how to use Feedly, be sure you add the Google Chrome extension.
This way you can quickly subscribe to blogs or websites you want to read in Feedly with just a click!
Final Thoughts
I hope this guide on how to use Feedly has given you some ideas.
At first, it might take some getting used to to read your favorite blogs, websites or podcasts in Feedly.
Once you start using Feedly though, I’m sure won’t switch back because of the amount of time it can save you in your business when reading and sharing your favorite content on your social media channels.
Out of the examples that were shared, which of them do you think you’ll use the most in Feedly and why?
Share your thoughts with us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments below.
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