Finances & Money

Now Entering the Ring: Tip’d Personal Finance Community

I’ll admit that I’m not the best at utilizing online community tools (aka social networking and discovery sites). I have a Digg and a StumbleUpon account (both named “cleverdude”), and I have personal MySpace and Facebook accounts. However, I tend to be either too lazy or too overwhelmed to really utilize any of these sites, much less start using a new one. Until today.

A certain PF blogger, who shall remain nameless, asked me to check out a new kid on the block: Tip’d. If you’ve used Digg, you’ll notice a major similarity. Both sites let users submit articles, place them into categories, and then vote on those articles. Usually the best articles in that category reach the front page of the category. Some articles will even hit the front page if they’re deemed worthy enough by the users. One of my articles about getting free laptops and plasma TVs reached the front page of Digg in March of 2007 with a whopping 1288 Diggs. That brought me about 25,000 hits in one day and has made the article one of my top articles in terms of traffic, ever. In perspective, at the time I only got about 50 per day at best. So it shows these social sites can be a big deal.

What does Tip’d do for you, the reader?

Tip’d could go one of two main ways:

1. Readers and site owners collaborate on promoting the best of the best finance-related content through proper submissions and voting. It becomes the best source to find awesome article about finance, investing, real estate, the economy and more.

2. Site owners promote only their content and ask their friends to tip their articles so they reach the front page. Other users get frustrated that they aren’t getting decent articles to read or tip and give up on the whole site.

Which one does it become? Well, part of that is up to you, the reader. If it’s just us bloggers tipping each other’s articles, then it’s not much fun. But once you’re involved, then I think Tip’d will be an awesome resource.

So to help you, the reader, submit my articles to Tip’d, I’ve added a Tip’d link at the end of each of my articles. You’ll need to register an account first, but once you’re in, you can use the site to browse through 10 different finance-related categories and tip the articles you like. You can also add me as your friend (I’m cleverdude).

Lastly, if you want an easier way to keep up on Tip’d articles, you can subscribe to the RSS feed or Email subscription. I just subscribed to it myself so I’m not sure how many updates I’ll receive each day or how useful it is, but feel free to try for yourself.