Today I’d like to share with you a few tools that I’ve recently started using that have changed my life. We can all admit that our lives are busier than we can keep up with and sometimes it feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do the work that has to be done, let alone to keep up with all the industry trends. However, using RSS Feeds and Google Alerts can make you feel like you’ve just gained a couple extra hours in your day. I follow a lot of blogs and websites, but going from one to the other each day was slowly draining all of my time. For those of you who have Gmail or other email services, RSS feeds and Google Alerts will save you a ton of time and help you to keep up-to-date on trends.
Why is this important to branding? The searches you did two days ago are searches that you need to do on a regular basis, but who has time to do each search every week? You also need to keep your fingers on the pulse of your industry. While you may have a favorite blog to read, do you get to read it every day? How do you stay informed about the best new blog released last week? These are all important things for you to keep track of and RSS feeds and alerts are your tools to make this feasible in the midst of everything else you have to do.
According to Wikipedia,
"RSS (most commonly expanded as "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format."
In a nutshell, RSS feeds bring updates from all the blogs and websites you follow into one place.
To find an RSS feed, look for that little orange square picture in the address bar of your browser. Click on it and then copy the URL. Then, paste it into your favorite aggregator like Google Reader. Once you’ve set this up, you can go directly to Google Reader to see all the updates from your favorite sites. It’s like reading a newspaper specifically designed for you!
Google Alerts are a huge time saver as well. You can set up various alerts and Google will email you daily or weekly with a list of new results. You can tell Google what you’d like to search for on a regular basis to find new content and it will do the searching for you every day.
To clarify, you want to use Google Reader for blogs and websites that you already read. Google Alerts will help you find fresh content based on search engine results. This may include an article published about your favorite author or a review of your business on Yelp.
I’d suggest you set up alerts for the following:
To see what is being posted about you and your brand:
- Your name
- Your company name
- Your website/blog
To stay up-to-date on industry trends:
- Your industry
- Companies you are interested in (for job seekers)
- People you follow professionally
- Professional Associations you belong to
I encourage you to take some time today to set these up. These will provide you with fresh information to tweet and will ensure that you are at the forefront of your industry. Keep track of the time you save and use that time to update or create your website 
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Tags: 30 Days of Branding, Google Alerts, Google Reader, Personal Branding, Social Media/Technology
