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Whether you’re a blogger or a marketer or you wear some other hat, you have probably noticed that it’s not that easy to discover useful content. There are some tools that can help, though. Read on to find out more.
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Perhaps you’ve encountered this problem in recent years. You’re trying to research a topic and it seems Google returns the same batch of results no matter how you change the keywords.
Maybe you wish to stay on top of a news story, but you’re seeing wildly different takes on social media channels and you’re unsure what the truth is.
Reactions, commentaries, hot takes from random people online overtake the digital landscape and the truly worthwhile information can often remain inaccessible because of this. What this means is simple:
Discovering Useful Content Is Not That Easy
The sheer volume of what people produce on the internet creates a curious problem. How do you find the gold in an ever-increasing swell of digital noise? In that sense, we live in the best of times as well as the worst of times.
Somehow amid all this convenience, we have to do a lot more work to sort out trustworthy news sources from fraudulent or worthless ones. So this begs the very practical question of…
How Can You Choose the Right News Sources?
More and more this becomes the question for anyone interested in discovering useful content during the current moment of online culture. The barriers for content creation and distribution have all but disappeared.
However, with the wealth of what’s published online comes the challenge of sorting out good content from all the harmful or useless content out there. Nonetheless, there are three basic things you can do to reach the right news source.
Research News Sources and the Authors of Content
Just as Twitter introduced its fact-checking feature this year, so do we have to do the footwork. In order to discover useful content, we must research where we get our content and who writes it. In a sense, we have to become our own journalists. This is precisely because people are publishing anything and everything online today at a truly astonishing rate.
Ask yourself. Who is this author? What else has he or she published? What are people saying about their work? Find out about the platform it’s appearing in. What’s the history? Who is running it? It’s not an easy task and few people do it, because there’s simply not enough time in the day, but it’s your best bet.
Use RSS Feed Reader
RSS is your best friend when it comes to discovering useful content. RSS feed readers now search for new content. In other words, they do more than just subscribe to sites. It varies from reader to reader, but most will definitely offer suggestions on popular feeds based on various interests. For example, Inoreader has perfected this feature and even builds on top of it with added deep search.
Exchange Ideas About Discovering Useful Content with Friends
You might be surprised just how wildly different your experience of the internet is compared to that of your closest friends. While on the surface level it may seem you frequent the same online haunts, algorithms factor in every miniscule digital habit and interest to tailor content to you.
Naturally, this means your friends will know about cool and useful sites you had no idea about. So swap some ideas.
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How Can RSS Feed Readers Help You Discover Useful Content?
RSS feed readers are perfect for discovering useful content because they’ve long expanded beyond the general constriction of text-based content. A feed reader can now support just about any type of media.
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It’s this versatility that helps you…
Subscribe to Blogs and News Pages
This is the bread and butter of RSS. The first generation of RSS readers could only subscribe to news outlets and blogs on WordPress, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other platforms. Today the shiny orange subscribe buttons are a thing of the past. Instead it’s your RSS feed reader that subscribes you to your websites of choice.
Inoreader has a neat function to directly search for RSS feeds in its internal search. Or if you discover a cool blog with lots of useful content out in the wild, catch with the Chrome extension.
Monitor Brands to Discover Useful Content
You’d be surprised just how many brands have built their content marketing strategy around being useful to their target audience. Creating value is one of the most important tenets of said content creation, and it’s something you might take into account within your industry.
Advanced RSS readers have proven themselves as capable to follow just about any type of social media platform out there. Inoreader is famous for its deep Twitter integration. All you have to do is select the brands you wish to monitor.
Follow Blog Comments
Some people might say that comment sections are dead, but that’s not so. Some publications and writers manage to keep their communities active with readers participating fully. One good source for valuable content or customer insight, if you’re interested in social media listening, are the comments on posts seeking recommendations or sparking discussions.
WordPress sites naturally support RSS for their comment sections, so subscribing is easy. In every other instance, you can turn to tools for generating RSS feeds.
Identify Influencers
Speaking of social media listening, we have to mention how RSS can be used as a great supplement to your marketing efforts by way of identifying influencers.
Through a balanced mix of branded and non-branded keywords monitored through your RSS, you come across the people online who are naturally talking about your company. These would be your brand ambassadors. You will also spot bigger online personalities with sway in the industry. These are better known as influencers.
Receive Notifications for New Content
You can (and most likely) still miss content as it arrives in your dashboard. You can thank fast-paced publication schedules for that! RSS feed readers might be the dreamcatchers of the internet, but it takes a keen eye to comb through titles. Why pressure yourself into constantly surveilling feeds, when you can let your RSS reader do all the work?
Advanced readers, Inoreader among them, can deliver notifications when a new article is posted. Inoreader further conveniences you with the addition of push notifications for mobile devices.