My Steem Ambassador Application

My Steemit Journey .. So Far

I've joined steemit back towards the end of August 2017.
I was just getting to learn about bitcoin, blockchain, and similar concepts, where I stumbled upon coinmarketcap and found steem.
When I read about the concept behind steem and steemit, something ticked in my mind .. this is a WINNER concept! and so my journey began..

Promoting steemit

I live in Lebanon - Middle East, so to my understanding, I was the first to board on this platform (I did search a lot to find anyone to connect with from my country, but couldn't find any back then)
And I can be a bit too enthusiastic in promoting a concept that I believe in, and so was the case with steemit. As of my first post, I started talking to my friends about the idea, skeptics exist, but more on that later.. I wanted everyone to benefit from steemit, and grow with the platform, but also help steem's price rise.. a WIN-WIN situation.

@arabsteem project

So unable to find any Lebanese on steemit, I thought of tackling the arab community here. Yet also steemit Arab community was also very shy, with so little contributions that could be found.
So I decided to kick off @arabsteem project!
@arabsteem's key mission is to help bring in, coach, assist and grow the Arab community on steemit.
Some of the key milestones and accomplishments done so far:

• Created the arabsteem account, and delegated 500 SP to it to give it some voting power to be able to help vote quality content.
• Created a discord channel that as of now has 135 members, and is active in connecting Arabs and teaching them on best practices to write quality content.
• Created arabsteem curation trail on steemauto, and joined in on this curation trail. The purpose is to upvote Arab created quality content, whether in Arabic, French, or English languages.
• Started voting Arab content with a focus on quality, better quality posts receive better votes. I was lucky enough to have had a successful journey so far on steemit that I have over 3,000 SP at the moment, so my vote gives a somewhat good value to post at slightly above 1 $ (and arabsteem's vote now at 0.25 cents)
• Started a daily curation digest, whereby a daily digest of the best Arab created content gets compiled and shared with the steemit commuity on a daily basis, this consumes at least an hour or two daily. This would be similar to the effort needed as part of steem ambassador requirements, daily curating quality promo-steem content.
• I also have 2 awesome people who started helping me out as well on managing our discord, providing ideas and promoting @arabsteem, namely @khaled-dz and @mokh-tar. Thank you guys for all the help so far.

Facebook Page and Promotion

I also thought about the aspect of bringing people across the Arab countries to steemit. So for this purpose, I created our Arabsteem facebook page whereby we are trying to raise interest in the Arab countries in steemit. As of now, the page has around 65 likes and we are posting almost daily. Recently I had @alfamano thankfully join in to help and write/share content to the facebook page.

Facebook Ads

I decided to take this a bit further in promoting steemit to the Arab World, and created a paid promotion on facebook to bring in more people to steemit.

The promotion as of 2 days ago, after running for 14 days, had reached 41,501 Impressions, with 390 actions out of which 354 are clicks directing towards steemit.com
I was happily surprised with the results, and decided to extend this promotion further to get more people to join



You can check out my most recent update on this effort here Promoting Steemit to the Arab World - Facebook Ads Updates - Jan 15 2018

Steemit Development Work

Being a developer, I also thought about using my skills to help further expand the potential of using and promoting steemit, particularly on wordpress sites, the most used CMS globally.
So I created GK Steemit Info, a wordpress plugin that allows adding steemit related info such as number of current steemit users, or posts made by a specific users to be displayed publicly on the wordpress site.
The plugin is available on github here with plans for further improvements, expansion, and also making it available on of the official wordpress.org plugins site.

For more info on this, you can check out my posts here:
Wordpress Plugin: GK Steemit Info
Making Steemit Posts Pluggable to Wordpress Sites - GK Steemit Info Update

Final notes

I'm glad so far of the accomplishments I have made, I have had so many new steemians join from Lebanon (I'm not the only one anymore lol), but also from across so many different Arab countries.
The Arab community is starting to grow and show more effort on steemit. Our SP is still low, we are always more than happy to get some SP delegation that could help us grow the effort further.
I can happily say I am proud and humbled by our contributions to the platform and to helping people succeed here, while I look further for future work and assisting both steemians and steem grow, and I believe by taking part in the Steem Ambassador, this would help accomplish our goals.

Thank you!

@mcfarhat