Without an investment in Steem, there is virtually nothing you can do on Steemit.

You can easily identify users with high-rep and post thoughtful comments to get their attention.

I've actually been very impressed with high-rep users responsiveness.

I've received several non-boilerplate replies from ura-soul, crypto.piotr, themarkymark, and even gooddream.

Socky and me-tarzan even gave me MASSIVE upvotes!