Step #1 – Set Up a Feedly Account
The first step in curating content to inspire you is to create an account over at Feedly.
Feedly is an RSS feed reader, which means you can copy / paste the URL of blogs you love (or blogs in a niche area) into the tool to generate a feed that makes it really easy to read ten, twenty or hundreds of the blogs you love.
All of the blogs you subscribe to can be sorted into helpful categories (aka feeds) and once added, will populate an easy-to-read feed like the one you see below.
Step #2 – Add Your Favorite Blogs or Blogs in Niche Categories
I’ll typically add 25-50 blogs per category. This is because many of them have a slow publishing schedule, which means if I only have 5-10 blog posts in a category, I may not see new posts for some time.
The goal is to get a really good feel for what’s happening in the industry or niche topic so that I can pick up on trends quickly and without much effort. I look for blogs that update often and get lots of shares to social media and, if they are open, comments. Once the blogs have been added, I login and refresh that specific category whenever I am about to do any type of creative work for a client or my own blog.
Step #3 – Browse the Posts and Process Them
After you get into a routine of checking Feedly, it’s a good idea to get into the habit of processing the new posts that appear. I like to leverage the “Read Later” or “Save to Board” options (as seen in the screenshot below) as it lets me clip things that I know will be good for my own writing or for my client’s writing.
Anything that I know isn’t a good fit or is more promotional or company-specific news related, I simply use the “Mark as Read and Hide” option, which removes them from the feed.
2 – Quora
Another fantastic source of content inspiration is Quora.