How to Use Feedly
I have been using Feedly since Google Reader closed down in 2013. I like everything about Feedly and has been one of my favorite learning tools and time savers. You can get started for free but there is also a powerful Pro plan.
Definitions
Feeds
How you organize your sources in Feedly. You can think of these as categories. For instance you may have a Finance feed with content from all of your favorite financial publishers.
Sources
Websites, blogs, news publishers, and media sites that publish dynamic content that you can add to your feeds.
Boards
You can think of boards being past tense. They are places you store content you want to keep. Or organize after you’ve read it. It is possible it could match a feed name but could also be something different.
Collections
Collection is a Pro feature and allows you to share the feeds you select, with others. Others can that add your collection to their Feedly account. You can see my collections at https://feedly.com/jasonraisleger
Read Later
You can click the bookmark to read an item later. The nice thing about this is even if you mark it as read, it will continue to be visible in the read later pane.
How Feedly Works
Feedly works by aggregating content from all over the web via RSS feeds. So instead of you having to go visit web pages every couple of days, it will store it all within their app. This allows you to have access to all of your information in one place without filling up your already overflowing email inbox. You can also share articles directly from the app with your social networks.
How to Organize Feedly
As mentioned above, Feedly is primarily made up of feeds and sources.
How to Add a Feed
First you will need a place to store your sources and this place is called “feeds”. The free account gives you three feeds so for this instance I am going to create three feeds: “Marketing Automation”, “News”, and “Photography”.
How to Add a Source
Now that you have your feeds set up, you need content to go into those feeds. Click the add content button. Now you can add sources on one of two ways
You can add it by pasting in a url of a website
You can search Feedly for topics that interest you
Adding Via URL
For the Marketing Automation feed, I am going to add these urls:
Once you paste the url in the search, click the follow button and assign it to the correct feed.
Adding Via Search
For my photography feed, I am just going to type photography into the search bar. It will return results by the Feedly Score. Some of my results were:
- Digital Photography School
- 500px
- PetaPixel
- DIYPhotography
Again, just click the follow button to add them to the correct feed.
I will let you setup your news feed however you want. You can add urls or your favorite website or just type news into the search bar.
Read
That’s it. Now you’re ready to start reading. Generally new sources will populate with 10 of the latest pieces of content but will update as new pieces get published. You can choose several different views and layouts; I prefer the “Title Only” view. You can click on the link if you want to read the article and it generally opens right in the Feedly app. I sometimes prefer to either double click the headline or right click to open in a new tab to go right to the actual website. If there are article that you don’t want to read, you can simply hover over the right hand column with the day it was added and click the “x”.
Sharing
If you want to share a piece of content with your network you can do so right form the app. Just click the icon of the network (or email provider) you want to share it to. You can also add items to board to reference later.
Free vs Paid
The free version used to be much more robust than it is now. Currently, free users are limited to three feeds and up to 100 sources. Don’t get me wrong, this should still suffice for most users.
I think the biggest thing the paid plan offers is the ability to have Google Keyword Alerts added to feeds. This is huge to collect the content that falls outside of your favorite sites. Some other paid features include unlimited feeds, integration options, sharing with LinkedIn and Buffer, saving to Pocket and best of all, no ads.
Is Feedly Pro worth it
I believe Feedly Pro is worth the cost. I think it is a steal for as many features as you get. It always works, is easy to use, and I love spending money to support companies and people that make great product and ensure that they will be around in the future.
Why Should You Use Feedly
Feedly is the easiest way to stay up to date with your industry or with things that interest you. Feedly works across job functions as well. Sales team could use it for lead generation or account management. You can use Feedly to monitor what is happening with competitors. I use it to follow influencers and generate content ideas. It’s the newspaper of today.
