An online bookmark serves the same purpose. When you find an internet site you want to mark for later viewing, or that you'll want to find again, you tell your browser to set a bookmark. These are also called favorites. This bookmark allows you to return exactly to the same site again and again, without ever having to memorize the link.

What Is Social Bookmarking

You've been using social bookmarking, even if you didn't know it! When you forward a funny e-mail joke or picture to a friend, that's a form of social bookmarking. You are socially sharing a bookmark to a website with a friend. That gives your friends exposure to websites they might never find on their own. They do the same for you when they send these informal social bookmarks to you.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites began as a way for web surfers to upload and save their personal browser bookmarks online. That way, web visitors are not limited to their own computers. By saving their personal social bookmarks online, they can access them from any computer.

The social aspect of social bookmarking is that everyone else saving their personal social bookmarks to these online sites can see and use everyone else's bookmarks! The social bookmarking site essentially becomes a giant collection of bookmarks contributed by many users.

Social Bookmarking Tags

Social bookmarking sites are built and organized by humans. However, there needs to be some kind of organization. Humans provide that too. Each social bookmark is submitted with one or more tags. A tag is nothing more than a keyword that describes the site being submitted.

If you visit a social bookmarking website looking for information on cars, you might search for the words "car," "cars," or "automobiles." The bookmarks with those tags will be shown in the search results. If you are looking for a specific type of car such as a Ferrari, bookmarks tagged with the word "Ferrari" will be shown. It's that easy!

Making Money With Social Bookmarking

If you have a website that sells a product or service, why not submit that site to the major social bookmarking sites? When you submit your internet marketing site to social bookmarking sites, along with appropriate bookmarking tags, you are tapping into a huge, extremely targeted group of people looking for information - your information!