This is a guest post by Sharon Donaldson, online manager at cottagelife.com. Be inspired! Contact me if you’d like to write a guest post too.

At cottagelife.com, we’ve recently revamped our home page and one of the tools we’ve incorporated is a free service from Publish2 that allows us to easily manage our news feed. We have created a home page section called News From Cottage Country that is a summary of links to regional and local newspapers.

The strategy behind Publish2’s tool is called news aggregation. The Huffington Post and the Drudge Report have been doing this for years. The theory is that if you pull together links of interest to an online audience, even if it means sending people away from your website, they will come back to you again because you’ve proven to be a valuable source of links on their chosen subject matter.

Even competitive news organizations use the strategy of news aggregation to their advantage: When western Washington State was overcome by flooding, four newspaper newsrooms at four different media companies collaborated to round up and share coverage of the flooding — both their own and coverage from other media sources around the state.

Practically speaking, using Publish2 couldn’t be easier. In about 30 seconds I installed a link tool on my bookmarks bar, and then installed the widget code into the desired spot in my home page. Now when I see an appropriate article on bracebridgeexaminer.com, for example, I simply click on my link tool, review the details of the link, hit save, and the headline appears instantly on my home page feed. I can even customize the headline if I don’t like the way the originating news source wrote it.

Publish2 is a free service for journalists and newsrooms to save, share, and publish links to the best content on the web. I don’t work for them, but I sure like using this tool.

Related:

• Link journalism and the Washington Post
• How links work