Google Reader is going bye-bye: What's a blogger to do?

As many of you already know (and some may not!) Google is closing their RSS Reader as of July 1, 2013.  For many bloggers this is one of the main places to keep our blog feeds together and organized, as well as one of the easiest ways to follow blogs, since GFC automatically uploads to the Reader!  So what's a blogger to do?  Never fear, there are many options for continuing to follow your favorite blogs via RSS and other ways, too!

This article from Life Hacker talks about several different types of RSS readers, both cloud based and desktop based.  It also tells you how to import your RSS feeds to your new reader.  One of the sites mentioned is NewsBlur, which I have heard about from several other bloggers as well, however there are limitations to how many sites you can subscribe to (up to 64 only) and if you want more you have to pay.  It's only $1 a month, but still.

Another option is to follow all your blogs through Bloglovin.  You can easily download all your RSS subscriptions from Google (Here are directions from Google's site) and upload them to your Bloglovin account.  If you don't have one of these I highly recommend getting it anyways because it's a great way to connect and find new blogs!

Lastly, you can begin following blogs through Hello Cotton.  This is a newer and smaller site for following blogs, but I like how it is organized by category and because it's smaller it is easier for your blog to be featured in the "up and coming" section!  Hello Cotton is great for discovering new blogs by category!

Of course there are the old standbys: Facebook and Twitter!  I don't know about you guys, but I tend to click over to blog posts a lot from these two!  Although July seems far away now, I am personally going to start cleaning up my reader and switching over my follows to another site so I can be prepared.  No word yet on whether or not this will affect GFC!

What's your favorite way to follow blogs?  What will you use after Google Reader is gone?

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This post was written by Rachel of Can't Google Everything.  Rachel is a lifestyle blogger living in the Philadelphia suburbs.  She is a wife, mom, teacher and lover of exclamation points!