TipDrop Users Guide explains how to do things on this social site. It covers everything I've learned myself so far, and anything anyone else cares to contribute. If you have any questions, please feel welcome to ask them in the "comments" section.
When I first came to this site on Thursday, August 26th, 2009, I felt like a complete newbie, so if that's how you're feeling, too, join the club! However, with a little exploring and a little experimenting, I managed to get the hang of it after awhile, and I'm sure you will, too.
Before you sign up, give some thought to the "username" you want to be known by, whether you want to use your own name, or whether you want to use a "screen name". For help in making this decision, scroll down through the list of tips on the home page of TipDrop.com to see what other people are doing and get some ideas. When you're ready, click the big blue button: Sign Up
Creating an account is easy. All you do is fill in your first and last name, your username, your password, your email and click "Create My Account" ... but before you do that, I suggest you read the "Terms of Service". It's short, so it won't take you very long, and there's some things in there that you should know, such as ...
"The TipDrop service makes it possible to post images and text hosted on TipDrop to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display data hosted on TipDrop.com must provide a link back to TipDrop."
After you've signed up, I suggest you return to the home page and click on the "TipDrop Forums" link in the top right area of the page and register for the forum so you're all set up to get answers to your questions, and maybe to help answer somebody else's questions in your turn.
What I did was go to the last page of the forum and started reading from the back to the front. This gave me an overview of what's going on here and also got me acquainted with some of the more active "tipsters", I guess you could call them.
Another good reason for signing up for the forum is you can send a private message to any of the participants. Also, you can type their username from the forum into the search box on the home page and find their Profile Page where you can send them a 255-character message.
Your Profile Page
Your Profile Page can be "customized" to reflect your personality, but there are some tricks to it, as I discovered when I tried to customize mine.
Click on the "Settings" tab at the top of your profile page. Then click on the "Design" tab on the left-hand side. This will open up a form where you can change the following four things:
1) Background Image
2) Background Color
3) Sidebar Color
4) Sidebar Link Color
The Background Image is the one I had the hardest time with, myself. If you're a whiz kid with images and such, then you'll likely skate through this part with no trouble at all. But if you're coming to it cold, with no special knowledge or image-editing software, then maybe some of the tips I discovered through the help of some TipDrop members will help you some, too.
For the image itself, I googled the term "background image" and picked grsites.com from which to select an image. If you go to my profile page and look in the upper left margin, you'll see that I picked an image of raindrops.
It looks pretty good now, but it didn't when I first started. The raindrops were so skinny they could stand sideways and stick out their tongue and look like a zipper!
That's because I didn't understand at the time that the "Background Image" should be 152 pixels by 745 pixels or it wouldn't upload to the page. So if you don't have a lot of experience with this kind of thing, then I recommend you choose a background image that doesn't have anything in it that would look the worse for being distorted by the image resizer at grsites.com because you will have to uncheck the "proportional sizing" box in order to get your selection resized to 152 x 745 and that's going to make it look stretched out of all proportion!
The "Background Color" is a different matter. I love color, so awhile back I invested in a nifty little software program called "Color Impact" developed by the good people over at Tiger Color. It has a little color-picker tool in it that lets you pick any color on your page that you like and gives you the "hex value" for it, which is just what you need to put into the form in the "Design" section of your "Settings" page. And the same goes for the "Sidebar Color" and the "Sidebar Link Color", too. I made my "Background Color" the same shade of sky blue as my "Background Image", and my "Sidebar Color" a lovely shade of purple, and my "Sidebar Link Color" a deep navy, which really makes my links "pop" against the purple background. Like I said, I love color!
If customizing your profile page seems too daunting to you, then one way you could overcome this is to grab the nearest 9-year-old boy and sit him down at your computer and ask him to do it for you to your specifications. Kids these days know all kinds of things we grownups don't!
Phil Jansen of South Africa has a bright and sunny profile page with oranges and yellows and a "shining sun logo" by way of a "background image". Take a look at what he's done. It will give you some ideas.
Jon Leger, the creator of TipDrop, used a professionally-designed logo that illustrates all his products in a unique and clever way ... pinned up on a bulletin board!
Once your page is colored up to suit you, your next step is to go to the "Account" tab under "Settings" and upload either an actual picture of yourself, or a "cartoonized" picture, which you can find lots of for free out on the web. Nobody wants to look at that "Mystery Man" shadow which is the default photo!
Impact Productions chose a cartoon drawing of a lightbulb that really stands out in a long list of tips. It looks great!
Aldric Chang chose a "cartoonized" photo, so if you've never seen of one of those before, go take a look at his. It might give you some ideas.
Your photo or cartoon needs to be saved in your computer in order for you to be able to "browse" for it from the "Account" section in "Settings" and upload it to your profile page.
Next is your "Bio", a 255-character description of you and your interests. If you're not sure what to say, just take a look around at what other people have put in their bios until you feel like you know what you want yours to say. It's not cast in stone, so please don't be nervous about it. You can always improve upon it later.
Whenever you do anything like upload a photo or change your bio, be sure to click the Update-My-Settings button to save your work.
The next step is to type in your AdSense Publisher ID, including the "pub" prefix, and click "Update My Settings". Then log into your AdSense account and set up a "channel" there for "TipDrop.com" so you can check your earnings from time to time. If you don't have an AdSense ID, then you'll want to get one, but how to do that is a subject I'll reserve for another post. (Note: There's an explanation of how to set up a "channel" for TipDrop in AdSense in the "comments" section below.)
The last step in your TipDrop set-up process is the "links" area of your profile page. At TipDrop, you are allowed up to 10 "self-serving" links. This is really great, because it gives you an opportunity to promote either 10 of your own sites or, if you only have one site, 10 of its most interesting pages or, if you prefer, 10 of the most useful sites you know about, or anything else you want to link to!
Sharon Olvera, for example, displays 10 pages from her scrapbooking website, ScrapbookingIdeasInspired, on her TipDrop profile page. She's also done something else which I think is really nice, and that's include a link on her TipDrop profile page to the "Contact Me" page on her scrapbooking website, so people can get in touch with her.
To add your links to your profile page, all you do is fill in the url of the site you want to link to, give it a title, and add a description in the blanks provided. Then click "Update My Links" to save your entries, check to make sure your links look the way you want them to, and you're done!
That pretty much completes your basic setup at TipDrop. Once you have your profile page all set up to your liking, you're ready to begin posting tips and building "credibility" for yourself.
If you have any questions, please feel welcome to post them in the "Comments" section below.
Happy Tipping!
Elizabeth
ElizabethAdamsDirect
Resources for the Home-Based Entrepreneur
P.S.
COMMENTS:
In the "comments" section below, Colin Dodgson
of SalesAndMarketingWisdom does a great job
of explaining how to set up a "channel" for TipDrop
in AdSense, if you're not sure how to do that.
