If you are serious about building a platform, you must be actively engaged in social media. Whether it is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+—or all four—you need to develop a tribe of loyal followers and super fans who want to hear what you have to say.

But who has the time? Social media can become a full-time job if you are not careful! And this leaves little time for doing your real job, whether it is writing, composing, programming, or doing something else.

I follow more than 200 blogs. I am often asked, “How do you do it? That would take me forever!” It would me, too—if I tried to visit all of these blogs daily. But using an RSS Reader, I can stay current by spending less than 30 minutes a day.

In this post, I want to show you how to set up Google Reader and then use it to keep up with your favorite blogs. This is not a post for “power users,” though even they might pick up a tip or two. It is intended for novices—people who are not even sure what RSS is.

About three weeks ago, my blog was dropped from Google’s search index. It had a significant negative impact on my site’s traffic and on my Google PageRank. I thought it might be helpful to document what I have learned so far in case this ever happens to you.

Even though my company officially uses Microsoft Exchange, including the calendar function, I use Google Calendar. I do this because a few people outside the company need access to my calendar. Google Calendar allows me to give access to anyone I want, provided they have a Google account.

Since Google introduced its Book Search program, we have been fielding questions from authors and agents. They are concerned that Google has scanned their books and the results are showing up in Google search. The primary concern is that consumers will not buy books because. Why? Two reasons:

One of my favorite bloggers is Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek. His book has been on the New York Times Bestsellers list for almost two years. His blog is one of the most-read on the Internet. Tim has become famous for challenging the status quo.

Recently, he posted a video of his presentation at WordCamp San Francisco, a conference for WordPress bloggers. Though I don’t endorse everything he recommends—and am still mulling some of it over—I found his blog tips compelling and stimulating.

Recently, I switched my blog’s email subscription service from Feedburner to FeedBlitz. Why? Because I listened to the feedback from my readers.

Feedburner is owned by Google and it’s free. It provides a simple way for bloggers to offer both RSS and email subscriptions to their readers. It’s free, but it is a one-size-fits-all approach. You don’t have much control over the formatting, especially for email subscribers.

At Thomas Nelson we use Microsoft Outlook for Windows and Microsoft Entourage for Mac. They are connected to our Microsoft Exchange Server. This setup has been our corporate standard for years.

I have used Entourage since I converted to the Mac about four years ago. However, I have had some calendar issues, and I am tired of the clunky user interface. I was using Entourage for both my corporate and personal email.

Making the change from TypePad over to WordPress has not been without its challenges. The biggest issue has been subscriptions. Before the change-over, I had more than 5,000 RSS subscriptions and more than 1,600 e-mail subscriptions. If you were one of these, please keep reading.

I am working with the TypePad tech support team to try and resolve the RSS problem. So far, they have been very responsive. In fact, Mark Simmons, the head of Marketing and Customer Satisfaction, wrote to me personally to express his disappointment over my decision to move to WordPress. He was gracious and offered to help in the transition. You can’t ask for more than that. I am still hopeful they can help me resolve this issue. We’re now going back and forth with their tech support.