There are just a ton of opportunities on our wonderful new chain. Bah, it’s not new, it’s already over a week old! One of the best ways to keep yourself moving forward and being the best you can be is to treat your Hive presence like a business. It’s not all that tough. It’s a lot easier to build a business here than on the street. Particularly right now with everything closed in many places.
Do you make music? Art? Can you write? All those are salable skills here on Hive, and we are all familiar with them.
The good news is that not only creators can make money here. Do you know what is good, what will sell? Curate. I love curated lists. I don’t have to look at 50 posts to find five good ones. Salable skill.
Are you an administrator? People all over Hive are crying for administrative help, and most of them don’t even know that is what they are looking for. The ability to administer skills is definitely a salable skill.
Can you write an articulate and relevant comment on a post that you like? This is one of the most ignored salable skills on Hive. Not only do you get paid for comments, you make an indelible impression on the person who wrote the post. Who might just decide to check out the rest of your stock in trade. Good comments are worth their weight in toilet paper these days.
Back to the task at hand. Building your business. We now know that you have a salable skill (called inventory in the brick and mortar world). What are you going to do with your stock in trade?
Sell it. Put it in cute packaging, price it and put it on the shelf in your store. Oh wait, you don’t have shelves.
Just because you don’t have shelves to put products on, doesn’t mean you can’t package your stuff in an attractive wrapper. Take some time right now and learn a little basic markdown or HTML code so you can make your product more attractive. In the general online world you are considered lucky if you have 5 seconds to make a favorable impression on a potential customer. 5 seconds!
If your post is just a blob of words customers are going to skip right over it. Like going back to a restaurant after a dirty handed clerk slops all your stuff on the plate and waves you over to a row of dirty tables. Probably not happening.
There are lots and lots of really good markdown and HTML instructions all over the place. I got really used to using HackMD ( https://hackmd.io/ ) when I was on that other blockchain, and I’ve used it to good effect here on Hive. I’ve also made a post using basic HTML directly in the ‘create a post’ window. Both seem to work just fine. Google search is your very best friend here.
If it’s a blog post PUT SOME PICTURES IN IT. Pictures grab customers attention, and carefully chosen pictures are a huge grab factor. There are a large number of places to get open source or no attribution photos and absolutely no reason not to have high class pictures to grab attention. Pay particular attention to the top photo in your post. It’s the one that will show in the thumbnail, so it’s what customers will grab. Or not grab.
Unsplash, Pixabay and Wiki commons have all been very good to me, and I like to attribute the place I got it and the artist that created it. Just click the < source> link under a photo in this post to see what I mean. If you want a copy of the magic code that provides that link just ask for it in the comments. I didn’t write it, but I’d be happy to share it.
So you have your post all wrapped and ready, put it on the shelf. You don’t have any shelves? Of course you do, they are called communities and tags in our business.
Hive is community centric. If you don’t publish your post to a particular community it can be just lost in the shuffle of posts. This may change some, but for now you probably need to pick a community that you like and trust and go for it.
You want to make sure you get it on the right shelf. You never, ever put the toilet paper with the fresh vegetables, it just doesn’t work. Choose your tags carefully. The first one is the category your post will be shown in, so take special care to get that right. It isn’t a bad choice right now to make your first tag your community tag. You want a tag that is germane to your topic. The other four are the same, but they aren’t necessarily so topic centric. If you took the pictures in your post photography might be a good tag.
If you want to make money on Hive, treat your business like a business. Smile. When in doubt, smile again. Remember that you really want your customers to come again. It’s way easier to retain a customer than to find a new one. Treat the people that consume your work with kindness and honesty and most of them will return. Again and again and again they will keep coming back to your Hive business so long as they get what they are searching for.
Thanks for reading this all the way to the end. Anything can happen and often does.
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