Moving right along with the components of F.L.E.E., today we are going to discuss Listen. Listening to the conversations taking place in your particular niche or market. If you will recall from yesterdays post, we used two tools to Find the conversations. Now we need to take a look at just a couple of the tools we can use to listen to those conversations.

Today’s Lesson

Lets revisit briefly why we need to listen to the other conversations taking place in the blog world.

• As a business, don’t we have a responsibility to keep informed about what is happening in our own niche or market. Aren’t we better at what we do if we know what is happening in our market.
• As a business don’t we want to know what our “competitors” are doing. Don’t we want to know what new things they are trying. Even the things that are and are not working for them.
• As a business, don’t we want to know what our prospective clients and/or customers are reading online. And if we know what they are looking at online, we can see how we can give them better information so they come to rely on us for that information.

Not only are the 3 reasons above extremely important and great reasons to listen to the conversations. Knowing what is being talked about on other blogs in our niche or target gives us a great source for ideas on what we should be blogging about on our own blogs.

Take for example a accountant or other professional service provider in one state who listens to what is being talked about on a blog in another state. That service provider in the other state is not a direct competitor with the other. So you won’t be giving any competitive edge to this other blogger by adding to the conversation and posting your own ideas or views on a topic they are blogging about. You can take what you are reading on these other blogs and use it for blog “fodder”. In other words you will get ideas on what to blog about by reading and following these other bloggers.

How we do this depends a lot on what tools we use. And the best way to determine what tools to use is to pick what works best for you. Of course, you know I am talking about RSS and how best to keep up with those blogs you are reading. Most bloggers only focus on the traditional ways to get the RSS feed of those blogs you are listening too.

• RSS feed coming into a RSS feed reader
• RSS feed coming into your email inbox

And those are the main ways you can subscribe to a blog. Additionally, bloggers want you to subscribe to their blogs using one of those two methods. Mainly because bloggers love stats and numbers and when you use one of those two methods, we get to add you to our numbers. However, the problem is, those two methods are not always the best for all bloggers. And I completely understand. There are other ways to Listen to the blogs you are following.

RSS or Email Poll Results

Sometime back I did a reader poll asking a couple of questions on how people subscribe to blogs. My purpose in doing so was really two fold. One, I and others had been discussing the question on twitter for a few days. And two, I knew I was going to be putting together the material for the 31-days to Kick Your Blog in the Butt series. Here is a a graph showing the results of the poll.

For me, I use RSS coming into my RSS feed reader and I even subscribe to some of the blogs I read via email. My reason for using email subscription is not earth shattering. I like to read some blogs on my iPhone and I have found using the iPhone email program works best for this.

Other methods to Listen to the blogs you have found

One method for getting your RSS feeds you want to watch is what Michael Martine at Remarkablogger calls the “Box Method”. And it is a method I use too. Not so much as it is my preferred way to follow blogs. But because I like to use those methods our clients might use.

Here is a great example of the “Box Method” of Listening to the blogs you follow.

Using tools or services like Alltop gives you the option of getting the RSS feed of those blogs you are listening in a form and fashion you can use. The key is to Find the blogs in your niche or target market who are carrying on a conversation and to Listen to those conversations using RSS. But using RSS in a way that works best for you. I am not going to enlighten you with the “best” RSS feed reader as there are a number of them which work great. Nor am I going to tell you one of three above mentioned ways of using RSS is better than the other. What I am going to tell you is this. There is no way you can blog and get involved in the number of conversations you need to be involved in without using RSS. And using it in some form or fashion that works best for you.

However, don’t bookmark them. When you think of RSS and are wondering how powerful it is, think of a news stand or magazine rack at your favorite book store. RSS can gather all of those subscriptions you want and put them in one convenient location. And when their is something new posted, it is sent to you and you don’t have to go hunting for it.

Your Homework for today

You should have already found some blogs in your niche or target market. Now, you need to take one of the three methods above, or your own preferred method and subscribe to some of those blogs. I would encourage you to go beyond just bookmarking them in your browser. Mainly because once you build your list of blog reading material, bookmarking is not going to work.

Tomorrow we are going to discuss just one more reason why you need to Find the conversation and why you need to then Listen to those conversation. We will be discussing Egaging in those conversations.

UPDATE: I received a few emails today asking just what is RSS. My apologies for assuming everyone is familiar with RSS and what it can do for you. Here is a video I actually make available in my “Subscribe” box to the right of this post.