Feed readers are one of the best tools a blogger must have. They group all your favorite blogs you are subscribed to so you can read their new posts easily with this tool without having to visit them one after another with your browser, is a way to optimize your blogging time. I currently use Bloglines.

The main problem that may arise is when you are subscribed to too many blogs so daily you have more new posts than the ones you can read. Another problem is when you don’t categorize your feeds and you have them all mixed without any sense. The solution is really simple: you must organize your feed reader.

First you have to be somewhat selective. Occasionally I read some bloggers commenting they have every day several hundred of new items on their reader. If you have new articles accumulated you don’t notice but you can create anxiety because you think of you have to read them, but being realistic there is a certain amount of items that can devour each day and the rest of them are likely accumulated to the day after with the following new items so it is like a snow ball growing as it does your anxiety. There are really good blogs which are not needed to incorporate to your reader because their thematic or quality make you visit them regularly when you want to know how things are going or for entertainment. In fact it is better for them because you help them to improve their statistics of visits.

The main usefulness of a feed reader is to speed up the time you spend reading the blogs you are really interested in so it is more productive in time terms to have them grouped into clear and separate categories. Due to my blog topics I have three large groups I browse almost daily:

• SEO
• Marketing, I mean general marketing tips and affiliate marketing.
• Blogging Tips

And then I have other groups, three or four, in which I store all kind of other interesting topics and I browse them when I want some entertainment or a source of new ideas. One of these groups is something like “testing period” in which I drop those ones of my three important categories I’m not sure are worth to be subscribed to but I want to give them a chance to convince me, and if they do it I move them to the proper category.

To make it short, to optimize the time you spend reading other blogs through your feed reader you must follow these two tips:

1. Be very selective with your new subscriptions.
2. Define clear categories in order to prioritize those who require more time.

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