Regardless of which RSS feed reader you use, you have to tell it where the feed is that you want to read, just like you have to tell a web browser where the website is. You give the reader the web address of the feed, also known as the feed URL, just like you’d give the web URL to your web browser. To find feeds, check out my current lists of RSS feed directories and search engines. If you’re looking for the feed from a blog, you can find specific blogs in my current lists of blog directories and search engines. If you’re looking for focused news about specific topics or from specific geographical areas, check out services like Moreover.com or major news sites like Yahoo News, San Jose Mercury-News, The Wall Street Journal, etc. There are more and more every day. Virtually every existing major publication with a web presence has at least one and probably many different RSS feeds to choose from today. Anyone of any size who wants to be a player in the future had better set one up this year.

Probably the easiest and most common way to find a feed is to be on the lookout, on any website you happen to be viewing, for a little orange button which says either RSS or XML, like the one on the right-hand side of the screen on my website.

Put your cursor on the button but don’t click. If you do click, you’re likely to see the feed’s actual XML source code in your browser, not the clean content of the feed (unless the feed is being processed by Feedburner’s browser-friendly feature, in which case you’ll see information about the feed instead of raw source code). So for now, put your cursor on the button but don’t click.

Once you do this, your browser will display the feed URL, which you then need to copy into your feed reader’s feed-selection mechanism. On a PC, right-click on the orange RSS or XML button, then select Copy, then go Paste the URL into your feed reader. I’ll walk you through how to do this with My Yahoo’s web-based feed reader feature and Mozilla’s Firefox browser (which has a feed reader built in) tomorrow. If the feed is set up properly and you want to read it with Firefox, all you have to do is click on the orange Live Bookmark button in the lower right-hand corner of your Firefox browser and you’ll be able to add the feed automatically, without copying and pasting any URLs.

On other websites, you might also see slightly larger colorful buttons from My Yahoo, Feedburner, Newsgator, Bloglines and many others. These buttons make the process of selecting a feed easier, if you’re using one of the specific RSS feed readers that a button is provided for. You can actually click the button and if everything’s working right, it will automatically add the feed to your list inside your feed reader. If it doesn’t seem to work, you can always do it the way I just described for the orange XML button above.

There are so many different RSS feed readers out there today that many websites have started offering a drop-down menu of feed reader choices, instead of an ever-growing chain of colorful buttons down the side of your screen. Once you’ve started reading a few feeds regularly, you’ll get the hang of the sign-up process right away. Many sites devote a page or two to showing you exactly how to subscribe to their feed with different feed readers. I’ve chosen to have my RSS feed processed by Feedburner’s browser-friendly service. When you put your cursor over the orange XML button on my site, you’ll see the URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Free-RSS-Resources

You can either cut and paste this URL into your feed reader, or you can click on the button directly to get a helpful screen of instructions, as well as a list of the current articles in the feed. Click the link above to see how this looks for my Free RSS Resources feed.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Powered by iPowerWeb. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.