I’ve put a referral program in place so that you can earn additional advertising revenue by referring other people to TipDrop.  It’s very simple:

1. Send people through your referral link: http://tipdrop.com/ref/Username (changing, of course, “Username” to your own TipDrop username)

2. The visitor will be tagged as referred by you, and 100% of all AdSense shown on the “house pages” (home page, search pages, category pages, etc.) will be keyed to your AdSense publisher ID.  When folks click, you earn.

3. The 25% of ad revenue that TipDrop usually keeps from user pages will instead be tagged for your AdSense publisher ID, and you will keep that revenue as well.

Each visitor you send is tagged with a 30-year cookie, so every single time they come back you’ll get the ad revenue as outlined above.

Be sure to go to your My Page and Settings to make sure you have your AdSense Publisher ID properly setup in your account, and then start referring folks and earning some money!

When you follow somebody, their tips become available in your Following Timeline (available from My Page in your account).

Following your favorite users makes it easy to keep up with all of their tips from one easy place.

To follow a user just click the ‘follow’ link in the sidebar of the user’s account page.  You can stop following them at any time by clicking the ’stop following’ link in the same place.

Isn’t it true that sometimes SEEING is believing? Or that it’s just easier to learn how to do certain things if you can SEE and HEAR it?

That’s why we’ve decided to allow users to create video tips here at TipDrop. Currently only YouTube videos are supported.

After you upload the video to YouTube (see their instructions on how to do that), simply copy and paste the “Embed” html code into the box where you normally type out your tip.

For full details of how video tipping works, click this link.

A number of users on the forum suggested that I implement a way for them to report tip sheets that are either spammy or contain offensive content.

While it’s true that spammy tips can be voted down by users until they lose all credibility and disappear, I decided to implement a method that works to remove these tip sheets from being listed on the home page or category pages faster than it would take to vote their credibility down to zero.

So now, when users of sufficient credibility click the Report This Link icon (which looks like this: ) the tip sheet will be removed from the home page.  When the number of people reporting the tip sheet grows even more, the tip sheet will be removed from being shown on any category pages as well.

Once a tip sheet gets reported enough to be removed from the category pages, it’s also marked NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW so that the search engines won’t index the tip sheet or send any visitors to it.

Thanks to the users who suggested I implement this feature, and thanks to those who are already using it to help keep TipDrop full of high-quality tip sheets.

Under the ‘Settings’ link there are now two sub-links: Account and Design.

Account is the settings you’re used to.

Design adds some design options.  From Design you can customize your:

-> Background image
-> Background color
-> Sidebar color
-> Sidebar link color

That way you can have a very personalized TipDrop user page experience — great for setting you apart from the rest.

For an example of what can be accomplished with this, see my own personal TipDrop page at:

http://tipdrop.com/jonathanleger

I’ve put together a mobile-friendly version of TipDrop.  It works and looks good on my iPod Touch.  If you have a mobile, check it out and let me know what you think.

The site automatically detects that you have a mobile, so it will use the mobile version without you having to do anything special.

All of the regular features of the site are available to you on your mobile.  One important difference is that there’s no category list down the right sidebar (there is no right sidebar).  You get to the linked list of categories using the Categories link that appears in the mobile user menu.

Well, TipDrop is growing fast.  In the first 24-30 hours the site has received more than 200,000 page views and 775 people have created accounts.

The site just got its 1,000th tip posted, and there are 445 tip sheets.  The site is already seeing some search engine traffic and a lot of traffic from folks linking to the site from their blogs, forums, etc.

I’ve contracted with a press release agency to do an international PR blitz in the next week or two.  I expect that to generate a lot more buzz as well.

Well the day (or night, in this case) has arrived.  I’ve been hard at work coding away on Tipdrop.com.  It’s a new kind of “social-knowledge” site that allows users to create focused, purpose-driven content that’s actually useful to those who read it (as opposed to reading about what some user had for breakfast–who cares!?!?).

I’ll post status updates and improvements to this blog as they are made.  Please join in the discussions at the forum as well.  I’m all-ears for suggestions for improvement as well, so be sure to let me know about your ideas at the forum as well.