Tipd 2.0 launches today with some new features that both readers and bloggers should find interesting and fun. Tipd is a social media news site for financial and personal finance news and a site I visit every morning to see if there’s breaking news I might be missing. Bargaineering.com is a Tipd launch partner and I’m responsible for blogger outreach.

(Click to continue reading…)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the beta launch of financial news site, Tipd, a social media site focused on investing and personal finance, and how I joined the team as blogger outreach. Well the day has arrived for Tipd to official announce its departure from beta with a new features and a little bit of fanfare.

Many of the new features are focused on users but there are a few in there for bloggers too! Let’s take a look at them.

New 1.0 features:

• All links from ‘published’ stories are now plain html links to your submissions. We don’t use any redirects, and no nofollows!
• We’ve added 2 new categories that were in high demand. These categories are ‘business’ and ‘entrepreneurship’.
• Our ‘add to tip’d’ button/script now has its own server so sites/blogs using the button don’t have to worry about their site getting slowed down because of external javascript calls.
• The ‘topple’ functionality (the burying/down-voting functionality) has been overhauled and made more robust.
• Stories now show the time made popular along with time submitted.
• You can now subscribe to published stories via email in addition to RSS.
• Site navigation has been made simpler and breadcrumbs have been implemented sitewide.
• Upcoming stories are sortable in chronological order as well as by popularity.
• Duplicate story handling has been improved. Users are now automatically redirected to the existing submission (the original to their duplicate).
• General usability and functionality fixes as well as better spam handling (for foreign language and pornographic submissions, for instance).

The folks behind Tipd have told me that this is just the beginning, that traffic is growing quickly and that the potential is great. Just the other day I was talking to Mu, a social marketing expert, and he said that many a site has been built on the social media successes earned off social media sites like Digg (Engadget and ArtsTechnica to name a few).

If you’re a blogger, sign up and submit your best stories. Read other stories and network with other bloggers both in and outside of your particular niche. I know that one blogger, Mike of Four Pillars, has been using Tipd extensively to market his new site ABC’s of Investing, a blog focused on explaining investing basics to investing novices. The opportunity is there, the cost is nil, take advantage!

If you’re a financial news aficionado, sign up and use it to find the latest financial news based on what other people like you are interested in. Mainstream media has long enjoyed being the gatekeeper of what’s important and what’s not, it’ll be these citizen-driven social media sites that now control what is considered important. There are so many blogs and news sites out there that you can’t possible read them all, using social media is the most efficient way to expand your horizons without burning through all the time you have in a day.

If you have any feedback you want directly piped into the ears of the team, please feel free to use me as a conduit. They’re dedicated to producing the best and are always receptive to new ideas.

Late last week, the two guys who started Tipd asked me if I’d like to join Tipd as a member of the advisory board. My role on the board is for blogger outreach, that is, talking to bloggers and seeing what they thought of Tipd, whether they had any suggestions, concerns, etc. It’s actually been quite fun reaching out to so many people, some of which I haven’t had the chance to trade too many emails with, and the response so far has been the site looks promising. Since it’s only five days old, promising is pretty good! With nearly seven hundred users tipping stories left and right, we’ll see where another week takes it.

The site isn’t just for bloggers, it’s for anyone looking to find the latest financial news. Readers of blogs can find plenty of good information there and you can help your favorite bloggers get their stories more publicity. According to internal stats at Tipd, front page stories get anywhere from 50 to 100 hits, which is a lot even to the largest blogs (every visitor counts!). Right now, it takes about ten to fifteen votes to get something to the front page. Even the youngest of blogs can get on the front page of Tipd, this isn’t Digg with all the politics and hand editing and banning BS.

(Click to continue reading…)

Tip’d, “a community for financial news, ideas, and tips,” is a new socially driven money news site (think Digg or reddit, but strictly for topically focused news on money related subjects like investing or personal finance) that beta launched today. If you’re familiar with social media sites, then Tip’d is going to seem very familiar to you as it builds on the lessons learned from other social media sites. It was all the familiar usability elements you’ve come to expect from social media sites from the “Tip It” buttons below the current Tip count, to upcoming news, commenting, and even a Topple button (to bury a story).

Why use Tip’d and not larger sites like Digg or reddit? If you’ve spent any time on either of those two, or any number of generic social media sites, you’ll notice that the popular topics tend to skew towards stories that are funny, political, or technology related. Money topics don’t really find a home there unless it’s railing against a major corporation for a bonehead move they’ve made or it’s a “helpful tips” type of post that merely touches on money. If you wanted to find good investing or money related stories, you would have to wade through a lot of noise before you reached anything of value. If you wanted straight investment ideas, like FOREX or individual stocks, forget it (unless it was Apple and their product release schedules!). Tip’d steps in to fill that void.

Tip’d is focusing on the following ten broadly defined topics: commodities, economy, green, private equity and VC, stocks, currencies, funds and ETFs, personal finance, real estate, and tech. You’ll notice that it’s heavily skewed toward investment and money management topics and that’s clearly by design. As of this writing, many of the stories on the front page are about the economy and new financial news – you won’t find any of these on the front page of Digg.

Will this succeed? The key to social media sites is in growth. The more users, the more news and the more accurate the voting. It’s the network effect (think telephones – the more people use them, the more valuable they become). Will Tip’d succeed in taking over the financial news social media space? That’s hard to say but if you look crew behind Tip’d, it’s filled with internet veterans (SEOs, social media mavens, etc.) that have more than a few notches in their belt. (just one example is their community director Mu, who is none other than Muhammad Saleem, a Digg rockstar with a submitted story to front page ratio of 33%)

I have a sense that this site could become huge (it’s like betting on the front office of the New England Patriots or the New York Yankees) and it pays to be one of the first movers. (if nothing else, sign up so that if it does make it big, someone doesn’t steal your name!)