Content marketing is no simple task. Producing high-quality and engaging posts can be more challenging than finding the perfect gift for your significant other, especially for small teams and startups. Near Me is always looking for simple and effective resources to help our marketers work as efficiently as possible. I’ve found that feedly is a fantastic platform that allows you to track industry specific blogs and creates a central location that enables you to read, curate and share.

For bootstrapped startups, the free version of feedly is very useful. Many of our clients have innovative ideas for successful marketplaces, but have little or no experience marketing a company and building an online community. When I help them strategize their social media plans, the first piece of advice I give is to consistently publish valuable social media content.

The free service provides a great workspace for organizing large categories of blog articles, rather than wading through a ton of newsletter emails or manually searching the web. Having a constant flow of relevant and up-to-date articles can help you link to outside blogs or create curated content of your own. Check out How To Curate Content Like A Pro for a look at effective content curation.

Features of feedly’s free version:

• Accessibility - feedly is available on your desktop as well as apps on Android, Apple iOS and Kindle mobile platforms. 

• Follow blog feeds - Follow topics important to you and your business. Search by title, URL, or #topic, pick from a selection of starter kits, or follow shared collections from other feedly users who have similar interests.

• Import feeds - Upload OPML to import feeds into your feedly account.

• Organization - You can create custom configurations to best fit your reading style. Group posts into categories, scan summaries, save articles to queues for later reading and tag articles to find them quickly.

The feedly Pro version maximizes productivity. For users who don’t mind paying $5 a month (or $45 for your first year), feedly Pro has some nice features to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth. Premium service provides the ability to share your feeds, integrate with other platforms and access direct customer support. Paid subscribers also have the opportunity to vote on development and features through the UserVoice channel.

Features of Pro Version:

• Power Search - Find specific stories within your feed or a specific publication.

• Share Collections - Share collections of feeds with teammates, friends and social networks to help others discover the sources you value and reinforce your brand. Custom sharing allows you to set up a custom or preferred URL shortener for your sharing.

• Faster Refresh - Feeds with small audiences are refreshed 4x more frequently.

• Integrations - feedly Pro allows you to integrate with platforms like Buffer, Google Docs, Evernote, LinkedIn, IFTTT and Wordpress, just to name a few. For tips on how to “hack” feedly integrations, check out this must-read article.  

• Premium Support - Your feedback or questions are sent to the support team first.

Even though a lot of the features of feedly Pro are flashy, the meat and potatoes of the platform are available in the free version. Even though the $5 per month subscription is extremely affordable, and gives you great functionality, bootstrapped startups can still get a ton of use from feedly without ever paying a dime. Check out the feedly Blog for a walkthrough on how to set up an account today.

Unless you’ve already got endless inventory and both the supply and demand pieces of your marketplace figured out (and if you have, I’d love to hear from you), then you’re going to need to start NOW. A solid Content Marketing strategy can help get people to your site, reading your blog and subscribed to your email / RSS and twitter feeds.

If you’d like to learn more about building a social media strategy for your marketplace, shoot me an email and I’d be happy to chat!