Tips 4 Web

This is a guest post by Mike Marshall. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

If you are like me, you have accumulated dozens of blog subscriptions in your reader. Maybe, too many subscriptions. Hundreds of articles pour in everyday. Huffington Post, LifeHacker, and TechCrunch alone can bury you in new postings.0

You need a fast process for reviewing new postings and picking out the ones that interest you. Time is the one resource that you can’t increase, so everyone needs an attack plan to spend less time working their reading list.

Use the following steps in Google Reader to triage new items, read the interesting ones, and not waste time on the others.

1. Select All Items and show only the Unread

Your browser may not support display of this image. Select the “All Items” under the Home section of your Reader Navigation Pane. Click the “New Items” link in the title as shown here. The point is to create a list of unread article titles on your screen as a working set. If you’d rather work with a smaller set, pick a folder that has a backlog of articles.

2. Review the titles and STAR the ones that interest you

Your browser may not support display of this image. Bloggers should know they need to write great headlines. If not, this step should prove the point. As a consumer, you should ruthlessly cull articles from your reading list if the title does not immediately grab your attention. If the article has a magnetic headline that makes you want to read it — “STAR” it by toggling the star to the left of a title. This puts the article in your Starred Item list. Don’t worry about these cluttering up your Starred Item list. We will clean that up later. Resist the urge to actually read articles in this step. That will slow you down and hurt your productivity.

3. From the All Items list, Mark all items read

Your browser may not support display of this image. This will mark all articles in this view as read including your starred items, but don’t worry those starred items are neatly tucked away, safe and sound in the Starred Items list. We go there next.

4. Open the Starred Items List under your Home section

The starred items from step 2 now appear here as Unread articles. This is your real reading list. The efficiency that you have gained already is a nice boost, but we are not finished yet. We have a few more tricks to process this list efficiently.

5. Read articles faster with keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to efficiently work your way through your list marking each article appropriately and quickly moving to the next. So as you read through these articles, toggle the star off with the “S” keyboard shortcut. Google Reader will mark the item as read just as you expect. Un-starring the article will drop it from this folder. It is left in its original list as a read article.

Here’s a few useful keyboard shortcuts that can cut your reading time:

Key Description
J/K Next/Prev Article
S Star/Un-Star Article
M Mark Read/Unread
? Show Keyboard Shortcuts

If an article is too long (or contains a video) and you really want to read it, but don’t have the time, just mark it as UNREAD and come back later to finish. If you want to keep the article, leave the star on, and it will remain in your Starred Items list as a read article so you can refer to it in the future.

Using this process, I cut my blog reading time down to only a few minutes a day. I don’t miss articles that are important to me, and don’t waste time on the ones that aren’t.

Mike Marshall is a software design professional and blogs at The Politics of Design.

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Speed Read Articles with Google Reader

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If you started applying the trick I mentioned on this post, I am sure you are already receiving more guest post submissions.

As your blog grows, however, you might start getting more submissions than you can handle. I receive 3-4 submissions per week, and I have seem blogs out there getting over 10 submissions weekly! The problem with this is that you might start messing things up.

For example, I used to accept some submissions and then I would forget to actually publish them. Sometimes I liked the guest post but would forget to reply to the author stating that and so on.

What I learned, therefore, is that you need a basic system to manage the guest post submissions. Here is the one I developed for this blog:

1. I fixed the frequency of guest posts that I would publish on the blog: 1 per week.
2. I fixed the day of the week when guest posts should be published: Wednesday.
3. I developed the habit of replying to submissions as soon as possible, either accepting or denying them.
4. If I accepted a guest post, I tell the blogger the exact date when I can publish it. If he agrees, I then immediately upload the post to WordPress and use the “Schedule” feature to automatically publish it on the right day.
5. As new submissions keep coming I just keep adding the accepted ones to the queue.

This system made it much easier to manage the submission. At one point I had over 10 posts queued, but adding new ones was easy.

You can still mess things up if you don’t keep up with the right dates, but it is certainly better than having no system at all.

That is what I use though, and I am sure there are other methods and tricks out there. Do you have any of them to share? How do you manage guest post submissions on your blog?

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Managing Guest Post Submissions Efficiently

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Today we are releasing a special report on the Online Profits website titled 10 Deadly Business Mistakes You Should Avoid. It is completely free, and you just need to sign-up for our newsletter to download it.

The report highlights the 10 most common mistakes that lead offline and online entrepreneurs to failure. It also comes with some real examples to illustrate the points. I am sure you guys will like the information there.

We are releasing it to promote the upcoming launch of the Online Profits training program, scheduled for January 18. The report will give you a good idea of the kind of material we offer on the training program (it was derived from one of the lessons, after all).

The Contest

In order to celebrate the release of the report I’ll be having a contest giving away 10 free memberships (worth $400 each) to the Online Profits training program. If you wanted to join but is short of cash, this is your opportunity.

All you have to do is to download the report and write about it on your blog or website. It doesn’t need to be a positive review, so you can even say it sucks…. Once your post is live just send the URL to daniel@dailyblogtips.com and I will add your entry.

I will draw the 10 winners on Friday 15 and post their names here on the blog.

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Grab Your Free Report: Business Mistakes to Avoid

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Today we are releasing a special report on the Online Profits website titled 10 Deadly Business Mistakes You Should Avoid. It is completely free, and you just need to sign-up for our newsletter to download it.

The report highlights the 10 most common mistakes that lead offline and online entrepreneurs to failure. It also comes with some real examples to illustrate the points. I am sure you guys will like the information there.

We are releasing it to promote the upcoming launch of the Online Profits training program, scheduled for January 18. The report will give you a good idea of the kind of material we offer on the training program (it was derived from one of the lessons, after all).

The Contest

In order to celebrate the release of the report I’ll be having a contest giving away 10 free memberships (worth $400 each) to the Online Profits training program. If you wanted to join but is short of cash, this is your opportunity.

All you have to do is to download the report and write about it on your blog or website. It doesn’t need to be a positive review, so you can even say it sucks…. Once your post is live just send the URL to daniel@dailyblogtips.com and I will add your entry.

I will draw the 10 winners on Friday 15 and post their names here on the blog.

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Grab This Report And Enter The Contest

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This is a question that has been on my mind for a while, so I decided to run a poll and discover what you guys think. The question is: it is becoming harder to get backlinks these days? What propelled that question was a collection of factors, including:

• A reduction on the number of active blogs around the web.
• A lesser inclination of bloggers to link to other bloggers.
• A migration of many bloggers into social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
• The increasing usage of the nofollow tag around the web (including on the social platforms mentioned above)

Do you think these factors indeed made harder to get backlinks? Are there more factors at work here? Have your say in our poll and leave a comment if you want to expand your opinion as well.

Is It Becoming Harder to Get Backlinks?(opinion)

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Poll: Is It Becoming Harder to Get Backlinks?

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As you probably know version 2.9 of WordPress created a small bug with the cron jobs feature, so scheduling posts ahead of the time was not working correctly. The WordPress community acted pretty fast to fix everything, though, and the new release is already available.

You should see a notice to upgrade on your dashboard. Otherwise just head to WordPress.org and download version 2.9.1 manually.

There were some other minor issues fixed as well, so if you are using 2.9 make sure to update.

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WordPress 2.9.1 Is Out

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I have some big news this week. The OnlineProfits.com training program will be opening its doors for new members again this Wednesday, January 06 (after one year closed).

The site was completely redesigned, and now we’ll have sections where you’ll be able to read articles and download special reports. The first report will be available on Wednesday, but the first article is already up. It is titled 10 Reasons to Work from Home Online.

Here is the first reason:

1. No more wasted time on commutes

Even if you live relatively close to your work, you’ll still waste a good amount of time commuting back and forth every day. For example, if your workplace is 30 minutes away from your home (either by car or by public transportation), you will waste 60 minutes per day, which translates into 240 hours every year.

What if instead of wasting those 240 hours commuting you could use them for something productive? You probably could read dozens of books, learn new things (i.e., how to play an instrument), exercise more and so on with all that time available.

If you are considering to start working online, I am sure this article will convince you.

Stay tuned for Wednesday as well. You’ll be able to download the report for free and to sign-up for the training program (we have quite a big waiting list so it should be a nice event).

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Here Is Why Working Online Rocks

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