There’s a ton of useful information online, but when you’re juggling multiple projects and looking at dozens of different websites, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
I started using Delicious.com a few years ago to organize my online bookmarks, and it has helped me tremendously to streamline my writing and research process. With the Delicious toolbar, I just click the “tag” button on my browser window and quickly save any web page with a few clicks and add my own keywords so I can easily find it later. Other examples of social bookmarking sites include Digg.com, Reddit.com, and StumbleUpon.com.
You can also use these sites to drive traffic to your blog or website, but I find them most useful as an organizational tool. These are some of the ways that social bookmarking can improve your productivity as a writer and/or blogger:
- Access your bookmarks anywhere. If you work from different computers, then this feature is invaluable. Once you log into the website, you’ll have all of your favorite links right at your fingertips. Last year when I bought a new laptop, I used Delicious instead of transferring the contents of my favorites folders.
- Cross-tag your bookmarks. With traditional favorites folders, you have to choose one title for each folder. I had folders in my market research for “women’s magazines” and “health magazines” and “regional magazines,” but sometimes I couldn’t remember which folder I’d used to save something if it fit into multiple categories. Social bookmarking lets you add as many tags as you need so that X magazine shows up in all of the applicable categories that you choose.
- Organize your clips. Whenever I get an online clip that I might want to share with an editor or potential client, I save it under my clips folder in Delicious, along with other tags like “business,” “food,” or “money.” Later when I’m applying for a business writing gig, I can easily find a bunch of business-related clips and choose the ones that are the best fit for the job.
- Swap links with other freelancers. Adding friends lets you share links in one click. The next time they log in, they’ll be able to see all of the links you’ve shared. I do this with several other writers, so whenever I find a new website or magazine that might be of interest to them, I pass it along and they do the same for me. It’s much quicker than emailing.
- Find more writing markets. After you save a link, you can see how many other users have also saved that link (and the other links they’ve saved). Say I bookmark the writer’s guidelines for a lifestyle website that I plan to query. I can see the ten other users who’ve bookmarked this same page, then click through to see what other pages they’ve saved. I’ve discovered a lot of interesting websites and even landed paying assignments using this strategy.
Have you tried social bookmarking? What sites do you use? Any new tricks I should try out?
