In this same vein of decreasing spam and to keep Tip’d relevant and interesting to our community, we also thought it necessary to publish an explicit set of rules for all submissions to Tip’d. If you have any questions or concerns about these guidelines, or if you ever want to report spam on the site, please feel free to email our abuse department at abuse AT tipd DOT com.

Submission Guidelines

1. Submissions must be topically relevant. Tip’d is a financial and business website at its core. All subjects primarily should be business or financially related. When you submit content, you then choose a category. While we have “green” and “tech” categories, any such submission should still be primarily business or financial. For example, “5 Great Anti-Virus Applications” just doesn’t work. That’s tech, sure, but it’s not business or financial (unless you can tie that into the article).
2. We love it when you submit news, ideas, and tips. But we’re not a classifieds service. Please submit relevant articles to the site. Submitting your “payday loans” or “business insurance” site’s landing page isn’t what we’re about.
3. Tip’d is not a deals site. We’re happy you have found 50% off that new microwave, but this isn’t the place to promote it. There are dozens of deals sites out there, so feel free to venture there.
4. Tip’d is also not a marketing site. Anything about “how to get more followers on Twitter” to “SEO” to “affiliate marketing” to “internet marketing tactics” just doesn’t work here. There is also a very strong Internet Marketing social news site. Pull up your favorite search engine and search for it. Submit there instead.
5. We have a “real estate” category, but listing your home for sale in Australia or Austin, TX doesn’t fly here either. If the topic isn’t financial or business — and we mean for the community’s benefit — it just doesn’t work.

At the end of the day, Tip’d is a community, but you must play by the rules in order to be accepted. The moderators reserve the right to take action on the accounts and submissions that do not meet our submission criteria. We will also ban IPs of egregious and repeat offenders. Alternatively, we may contact you directly to send a warning.

We hope you enjoy our community. We’ve spent a long time building it and making it approachable. Please make yourself at home, pull up a seat, and join our family.

So far, the response has been very good, as the widget has been sending hundreds of new visitors to Tip’d each day since the new design launched.

• Smart Money is now including a Tip’d button on their article pages.
• Many blogs in the AOL Finance network, including Walletpop, DailyFinance, and BloggingStocks, are now rocking the Tip’d button.
• AddThis — the 800 lb gorilla in the blog widget space — has added Tip’d to their list of social bookmarking options.
• Thanks to all the new partners… of course we also owe a lot of gratitude to all of our partners: Kiplinger, Bargaineering, et al for their continued support.

The good news for publishers who integrate Tip’d widgets and submit stories to us, is that we send quality traffic back to them. We’re hearing good feedback from publishers who land on the homepage (both in terms of quantity of referrals sent, and their quality… i.e., they convert better than untargeted social media traffic). So if you haven’t integrated a Tip’d button to your blog or Web site, check out the options here.

10k may be small potatoes compared to Digg or Twitter but we think it’s pretty good for a bootstrapped social finance site. Next stop, 100k!

• Version 1.8 just came out and includes many new social news sites and services.
• Tip’d is now included as well!

You can get the latest version of Shareaholic here.

• Knowem: This site really took the “check username app” concept to the next level. They offer several paid services and also got a ton of buzz recently.
• SexyBookmarks: This WordPress plugin is notable because it lets you choose which services to include and also has an eye-catching icon design (good for enticing blog visitors to bother to bookmark/stumble/etc.)

That’s it for today, but if you’re looking for a social wordpress plugin, or want to make sure to get your username everywhere, check out Knowem and SexyBookmarks!

• Tip’d gets a lot of spam every day. We don’t always get everything perfect, and we’ve made mistakes before. But we try to hold the line between keeping the community experience positive (getting rid of annoying spam), and being webmaster-friendly (we don’t want to become yet another social media site that’s hostile to webmasters). Personal finance bloggers helped to make Tip’d successful, and we want to make sure they’re happy participating at Tip’d.
• We rely on our community to Topple stories they think are spammy.
• Stories which are clearly spam (e.g.: a story submitted in a foreign language, or which is about diet pills) will be manually removed by our moderating team.
• Stories which are a “judgment call” (e.g.: a story about a credit card deal) are judged by the community (via the Topple function).
• I can’t reveal our algorithm, but a story can be Toppl’d while it’s on upcoming, or after it hits the frontpage.
• We’ve noticed an increase in the past few months of unnatural voting activity. When it comes to “judgment calls”, we’re generally going to be less tolerant of a story which has had “unnatural voting activity.” And for the record: getting a vote from a friend on a story isn’t over the line. Getting 20 bumps on a story within 60 seconds is over the line.

The bottom line: stories will be Toppl’d from time to time by the community, and unless you hear from our moderator team, it’s not really anything to worry about… please keep submitting your stories to Tip’d, even if a few get Toppl’d!