One of the "problems" Steemit has as of right now is the incredible number of people who join every single day, that constantly ask for followers, upvotes and comments, in exchange for their interaction with the community.
I guess it happened to all of us. We spend an hour writing an article, we do our best to make sure that article is as good as it can be, we add images and valuable information, we publish it, and then we receive a comment that says "Nice, followed, upvoted, please follow and upvote me back!".
We're tired of those people. I know I am, the main reason being that it's so obvious that's not the way to do things. You don't need to ask for upvotes and you don't need to ask people to follow you. If you have 1200 posts and only 30 followers, there has to be a reason for that. Maybe it's your bad content, or maybe it's your attitude towards criticism.
No matter what the case is, asking people to follow you or like your posts won't help you with anything. It will only help others realize you're annoying and you're not capable of creating content good enough for people to follow you without having to ask them.
If content is not your strongest point, there are other ways to get yourself a few new followers or even upvotes. You'll need to work a little and invest some time on this website, but it's worth. That method is called - interacting with people.
Whenever I have the time I take around an hour to spend on Steemit and consume content. I open a bunch of articles that seem interesting in individual tabs on my browser, and I start reading all of them. I leave comments on the ones I consider to be interesting and I also upvote the articles I really like.
That's the best way to get followers and upvotes - care about the content other people make, enough to actually consume it, take some time to write a long and useful comment that will provide precious feedback to the author, and upvote the articles you like, not only the articles that you think will make a lot of money.
You may think that's too much work and you don't have time to do that, but it's one of the best methods to actually get a little known in this community. That's the best way I know to make people follow you or at least check out your content.
For example 
There's a saying that sounds like this "Ask and you shall receive". I'm pretty confident that here, on Steemit, it's a little different - "Don't ask, provide, and you shall receive". If you're willing to work hard to create interesting content, and if you spend enough time interacting with the community and give some valuable feedback to those who create valuable content, I'm sure you'll receive way more rewards than what you get from asking people to follow and upvote you.