If you're brand new on Steemit and looking to start well to end well, this is a step-by-step getting start guide for you. Also share this with your friends you invite onto the platform, so that they will have an easier start and not get discouraged before they start seeing success.
It's easy to get overwhelmed by how much there is to learn as a beginner. When I started just a few weeks ago I found myself jumping back and forth between one idea and the next until I felt like I was going around in circles. I couldn't even remember half of what I'd already read.
I hope this guide will spare you that. May it lead you to focusing on the right things in the right order to make consuming a huge amount of vital information to be something not so overwhelming. Just eat the elephant one bite at a time. (But don't eat real elephants. That's mean.)
I suggest you read this twice. First, read it start to finish to get a high level understanding of how it all fits together. Then go back through a second time, following the links and reading those linked articles as you go. This second time through should take you a few days, so be sure to bookmark this page. I suggest you create a bookmarks folder for Steemit and put all the linked pages there as you go, plus any others you find in your study of of the platform.
Once you have an account, it’s a good idea to go through the material in the Welcome section you’ll be landed on. You may want to rush in and get your first article written so you can start earning, but plan on spending a few days just learning and commenting on articles from others, then make your first post sometime in that first week.
I would amend the Welcome 'To Do list' slightly to cover your first few days like this:
@indigoocean. I don’t promise I’ll follow you back, but if you pay attention to #8 and do that well, I generally will, and will also sometimes resteem you to help your posts gain visibility. Here's a great article on succeeding with commenting as a newbie.Once you’ve gotten your introduce yourself post out there and started building connections with others in your topic area, it’s time to mostly focus on writing great content consistently. Try to stick to one new post per day, or if you can’t manage that, one new post every other day (which honestly is what I wind up managing to do). It’s more important to write high quality articles than to just put something out. Remember that you want to build a reputation as a quality writer, so that other quality writers will read and share you.
Here are a few advance topics to slowly take on after you’ve gotten the hang of simply writing well on the platform:
It’s important to keep in mind the difference between Steem Power (SP), Voting Power (VP) and Reputation.
SP is how much money you can give with your upvotes, and VP is how often you can give it. (Thanks to 
You can increase how often you can give money by decreasing the % you give each time using an app like SteemPlus. So think of power in the system as the power to give, and realize it is a factor of SP and VP available that you can parcel out within each 24 hour period.
Reputation is earned by getting upvotes from others on your posts and comments. Someone with a lower reputation can help but not hurt the reputation of someone with a higher reputation by up/down voting them.
(Please don’t downvote people’s posts/comments. It isn’t just a ‘dislike’ button but actually flags them and you’ll make enemies like that. Just ignore posts you don’t like, unless you feel they are harmful to the community or abusive.)
Note that someone with a lower reputation who has a lot of SP can financially hurt someone with a higher reputation by using downvotes to decrease rewards in their post’s earnings pool.
You can get more SP simply by buying it. You can buy STEEM then “power up” to convert it into Steem Power (SP). (The easiest way to buy STEEM for powering up is under your wallet within the system using Blocktrades. I traded one of my altcoins on Binance for it and had to then send it to Blocktrades for my Steemit account, which was a little confusing. I’ll make a video on that method at some point.)
If you can afford it, this is a good thing to do. You will succeed much more quickly on the platform if you can give upvotes that give people at least a few pennies. People notice that, especially on their comments. (It’s harder to tell who gave what with an upvote on a post.) You’ll also get to enjoy being more generous on the platform, which is a big part of the Steemit experience. And when you post yourself and take the default of upvoting your own post, you’ll also earn more of the rewards pool for yourself.
So by investing a little in STEEM, you’ll earn more and give more, right from the start.
(Remember that the money for rewards doesn’t come from your own SP or STEEM balances. Your SP determines how much power you have to parcel out the rewards pool for the entire platform. So your stash doesn’t decrease when you upvote people.)
Speaking of money, let’s dive more deeply into that too….
The main currencies on Steemit are STEEM, SBD (steem dollars) and SP. I’m not going to try to give a comprehensive treatment of that here, because it’s been done to death elsewhere.
The main thing I want you to keep in mind is that you should think of your Steemit financial experience the way you’d think about any business and realize that if you want to make more, you’ve got to be willing to invest in your business.
So if you can buy some STEEM to increase the amounts given and received with your upvotes, do. If you can buy some SBD to pay bots to advertise your posts for you, do. You can read more on this in my avoiding frustration post.
If you don’t care about the money dynamics and just want to write and interact on a platform that rewards generosity and kindness, then do so. Enjoy the experience that is unique to Steemit and don’t worry about how much you make on any given post or comment. There’s plenty of reason to be here even without the money. Which brings me to another important point….
As I mentioned previously, I’m a values-based crypto investor. That means I care about profiting from my crypto investments, but I know I can do that with many coins, more than I can actually invest in. So in picking the short list of coins for my portfolio I aim higher than mere profit potential. I also want to see that a coin expresses my values.
In the case of STEEM and the Steemit platform that uses it, yes, it very much does. I value kindness. I value generosity. I value paying content creators for their content. I value creating communities of shared interest from around the world.
Investing in STEEM supports all of this, so even if you didn’t blog on the platform, it would still make a great values investment. (Thanks 
Once you get the above basics down, there is still more you can do to really accelerate your path to success on the platform. Note that I say accelerate it, because really the only thing it takes to be successful is to keep putting out quality writing, consistently, over time, while replying to comments on your posts and commenting on the posts of others. That’s it. You do that and in time you’ll be earning on here within a community you really look forward to interacting with each day.
But let’s say you want to speed that up a bit. In addition to things I’ve already stated above, here are some resources that can help you.
@ilyastarar has a great article on setting it up, and many great articles actually. You’ll need to use Discord to use it and it will notify you anytime you have discord open with notifications on. You can also set it to notify you of other things besides replies, but this is the big one for me. That way you don’t have to keep checking for replies all day. A similar tool that gives you the option of being notified on Discord, Telegram, Slack or Steemit Chat is SteemWatch. It’s easier to set up than Ginabot but has fewer options. Still, it let me choose to be notified of replies to or upvotes of my comments, and that’s the main thing for me.Well this is pretty extensive, so while there is certainly more beyond this that you will learn during your time on Steemit, I think this is enough to get you off to a really strong start.
Pace yourself in applying everything you just learned, and don’t be hesitant to read some of the linked articles more than once.
Best of luck to you with your Steemit life!
And please do follow me if you have interests in spirituality, nature, and/or values-based crypto investing. I have an article coming up on values-based investing, then will probably be going back to sharing the spiritual stories and inspirations I joined Steemit to connect around.
If you write on such topics, definitely let me know in the comments so that I’ll know to check out your blog. Or if you aren’t posting just yet, mention me when you get to the point that you’re writing articles on those topics and I’ll come check out your articles then. I’m pretty new myself, and have greatly appreciated help from those who have gone before me, so very happy to pay it forward.
Resteems always appreciated
Photo Source: Depositphotos
