How to have the latest news about your clients delivered to you for free.

It's important to keep up with news about, or relevant to your clients, but who has time? Life is difficult enough without searching for this sort of thing on a regular basis. But what if you could get a newspaper that just contained news about your clients? And what if was free? Would that help you?

Here's a way that you can put together your own, free, personalised 'news aggregation' service, tailored just for you. You can set the whole thing up in less than half an hour, and it's Google we can thank for providing all the tools that we need.

1. Set yourself up with a Google Reader account. If you're familiar with using RSS feeds, then you can use whatever tool you want, but if you're not, this is a great place to start.

2. Browse your way over to Google News, and search for news about your clients or your market sector. On the 'results' page you'll see the words "RSS | Atom" feeds. Click on one of them (doesn't really matter which), and you'll be taken to a new page. Provided that you're logged in with your Google Reader account already, you'll see a button at the top of the page - "subscribe to this page". Go ahead and do it, then do another news search for a different client and repeat the process. Your Google Reader account will now contain all the feeds that you've set up so that you can catch up on all the latest news in one place.

You can also 'share' items that you find interesting on a public page. So you could even have someone in your company read through all the news everyday and flag up the interesting items to go onto the public page for everyone else to read.

Enjoy!

In a post coming soon, for the more technically advanced of you, I'll show you a way to filter these feeds and join them together using Yahoo Pipes so that you can be even more efficient.

By the way, you can subscribe to this blog as an RSS feed as well - just click on this link: http://www.bullfrey.com/blog/atom.xml