A Short Guide for Newbies

Hive Naija Prompt

Pexels

I joined Hive this year, and just like yesterday, it’s been months now. I appreciate @jjmusa2004 for the onboarding process, which was at first challenging, but as time went on, I was able to navigate my way through. We all keep learning, and I know I still have a lot to learn about this platform. But so far, so good; my experience has been very smooth. I would love to share a few things I learned as a newbie. I made a number of mistakes before getting it right on this platform, and based on these, I have the following points for new entrants.

I had to learn the alignment of tags with posts. The first five tags of a post are the most important tags that determine to which category a post belongs. For you to understand this as a newbie, search for the community of your choice and check the ‘about’ of the community to get a picture of the rules, posts allowed, and other dictates of the community. This will guide your decision on whether or not you can post in the community or even use such as one of your hash tags.

The next thing I learned is that there are major sites where you can get your preferred pictures. You can get it from Pexels , Pixabay , and Unsplash . I will recommend these three platforms because you can get almost all the pictures you need for free. However, watch out and confirm that they have no watermarks. Most pictures on these sites are clear and on good display.

As a newbie, I am always on the lookout for corrections, and I effect them immediately when they surface. Several times I have been corrected by @theinkwell among other authors that contributed to my success. Even currently, I don’t know it all. So I am open to corrections. This is an attribute I’ll always recommend for a newbie.

Hive is a wide community, and everything can’t be learned in a day. Newbies need to realize it is not about smartness, willingness to learn, or any of the other above suggestions that guarantees smooth onboarding or success on hive. One should also have patience. If you are easily frustrated and cannot be calm enough to learn even when things are not making sense to you, then I think you need to learn how to do that. Because if you are not patient enough, you may end up losing a detail. All details are vital.

I will conclude with an example of a mistake I almost made. At first, I never knew there were limits to posts per day; I have some time then, and I write a lot. It took the intervention of a fellow hive blogger and I followed her recommendation.
Another aspect is getting the topics and requirements of communities right. It is good to be eager to write, but it is better to understand what you want to write about before penning your thoughts. Also, try to read and comment on posts by other members of the community. I have said a lot and really wish to say more because I wouldn’t want anyone to make the mistakes I made as a newbie.