How to Setup and Use an RSS Feed Reader

In today’s world it is important to keep up with what’s going on around you. Depending on your profession, it can mean the difference between being successful and looking for a new job. As an entrepreneur in an environment that is constantly changing, having the knowledge of what is going on in your industry space is invaluable. The question is, how do you keep up with it all? What if I told you that you could keep up with what’s going on in your industry and have it delivered to you everyday in an organized, ready-to-read format?  Well, I’m happy to say that it’s not only possible, it’s easy. RSS feed readers allow you to have timely, organized, articles delivered to you as they are published. In this post I’m going to show you how to setup and use FeedDemon feed reader to have news articles and content delivered straight to your computer.

RSS stands for rich site summary and is often dubbed “”really simple syndication.”” RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works like blog entries, news headlines or audio/video in a standardized format. An RSS document (usually called a feed) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. There are quite a few RSS feed readers that are popular, Google Reader and NewsGator, among others. For this post, I’m going to use FeedDemon, although the steps are transferable for virtually any other reader you choose to use.

Step 1: Go to FeedDemon.com, Download, and Install

Go to the FeedDemon homepage, then click on the ‘Download FeedDemon button found in the right of the page.  After the download is complete, install the software to your computer.  Please note that this software is for Windows based operating systems only.

Step 2: Go Find and Copy RSS Feed URLs

Now you need to determine which website RSS feeds you would like to subscribe to. This will be dependent on what industry or topic you are trying to keep up with. IASourceLink staff will soon publish another blog post with our favorite RSS feeds we recommend to use as a starting point. For now, we will use Inc.com as an example.  See the screenshot below to see where their RSS icon is located.

After you have found the RSS symbol on the site, right click on the symbol and select “”Copy link address””. You may have to search around the site a bit to find the RSS symbol, and keep in mind that not every site that you want content from will use RSS.  Keep in mind that some browsers have built-in RSS feed readers, so clicking on the icon may subscribe your browser to that feed.

Step 3: Add Subscription to FeedDemon

Now that we have the link for the RSS feed copied to our computer, we can paste it into our subscriptions within FeedDemon. You can add different folders within your larger subscriptions folder if you’re keeping up with several sub-topics within a larger topic like entrepreneurship. Click on the new subscription tab within the subscribe button in the upper left hand corner of FeedDemon and paste in the URL feed.

Step 4: Enjoy Content Delivered by RSS!

You now have a subscription set up within FeedDemon. Content from Inc.com will be delivered to your FeedDemon inbox as it’s pushed out. It will be displayed like this:

Now that you’ve walked through an example of how to setup an RSS feed subscription within a feed reader, you’re ready to go forth and subscribe to content.

Content contributed by Maria Brown, SoMNSourceLink. SoMNSourceLink is a proud affiliate of U.S.SourceLink, America’s largest resource network for entrepreneurs.