Never lose your bookmarked beady websites!

To paraphrase Billy Joel, I’m in a bookmarks state of mind. I was writing about book thongs the other day, and now on to social bookmarking.

What is social bookmarking?! Is that like Stitch ‘n Bitch? Or the bead society meeting where everyone does a beaded-bookmark challenge? Actually, it’s something way better. Something that can help you grow your business!

Social bookmarking is a version of the Bookmarks or Favorites function you’re probably already using on the Internet. You’ve probably got a lot of places ‘Favorited’ in your computer already. But what if you’re traveling without your computer?

• You might need to place an emergency order for jump rings from, oh, who was that supplier?
• And who was that cool artisan on Etsy who you wanted to refer your sister to?
• How about showing a craft-show customer something in your online store, via someone’s wi-fi?

Human memory sometimes helps out… But if you install a social bookmarking button in your browser’s tool bar, every Favorite will be stored online. That means you can go back to that social-bookmark site wherever you are in the world, from any computer, and use your bookmarks. Never miss an opportunity to support handmade businesses again!

And when you bookmark a favorite site online, you can add some descriptive tags to it. So other people can then find recommendations by searching for tags that match their interests. (That’s the “social” part of it.) For example, if you bookmarked Rings & Things and tagged us as ‘bead supplier’, ‘beads’, and ‘findings’, searchers with similar interests could find this site too.

I should explain that what you’re really bookmarking is web pages, not whole sites. This means you can save as big a list as you want of various neat things that you found on any given site. An example from Rings & Things again might be bookmarks of our lead information page, our inches to millimeters conversion page, our blog’s main page, and The Tank bracelet (it’s awesome) in our Design Gallery.

There are dozens of social bookmarking sites. Check out a few major ones:

• del.icio.us (great website address, huh?)
• Digg (this is more about sharing recommendations of good information, like a neat blog post, cool tutorial, a news article, etc.)
• Technorati
• Bloglines (if you read a lot of blogs, this is a good tool for managing the bookmarks on one page)

Did you know, you’ll be helping out the sites that you bookmark? The search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN all pay attention to social bookmarks. Every bookmark you make is a recommendation to the search engines that “this is an interesting site.” As a result, that site tends to show up a bit higher on the screen when people go searching.

Have other favorite bookmarking sites? Use them for other reasons? Share your thoughts by leaving a Reply!

Exciting news: every month, we’re going to hold a lottery right here on the Rings & Things blog. Here’s how it will work:
*At the beginning of each month, I’ll announce a new lottery.
*You enter by leaving Replies, also known as blog comments. Comment on any post(s) this month.
*At the end of the month, I’ll randomly draw 2 names to receive surprise goodie packs!