Lots of newbie Steemians enter the Steemit ecosystem completely unaware of how things work, only to be utterly confused and often times abandoning the platform without actually getting to know it properly. And that's a pity for the whole Steemit community, because every Steem/Steemit member adds unique value and personality. Even lots of (relatively) seasoned Steemians struggle to be succesful on the platform. A part from that, I'm just a Steemit Newbie myself, still struggling to get a good grasp of the platform's concepts - who am I to publish this guide?, you could argue -, but none the less I decided to write this blog post anyway because A writing it helps me to structure my thoughts, and B it might catalyze new ideas in the comment section below -- Hint! ;-) --.
The following paragraphs discuss the hereby proposed fundamental principles on how to be successful on Steemit.
Steemit is currently a unique phenomenon among the multiple blockchain technologies / platforms in that it allows non-techies and people not pre-owning any crypto assets, literally anybody connected to the internet, to use the platform without actually realizing they are using blockchain technology and crypto assets at all. Steemit therefore effectively functions as an entrance portal to the world of crypto assets and blockchains, allowing anybody to convert time, in stead of just capital, into platform ownership. Yet in order to be (relatively) successful on the Steemit platform, understanding its inner mechanisms is indeed important, I think.
Gaining on audience on Steemit roughly follows the same "rules" as any other social medium. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, but like Twitter for example, Steemit members (Steemians) can freely choose who they follow without the followee's consent, and can be followed by other members themselves. If you follow somebody, their new posts will pop up in your Feed so you can choose to read that post, so if you publish a blog post yourself, your own followers might read your own new blog post as well. If people like your post, they can upvote it, and depending on their amount of Steem Power that upvote can bring you actual Author Rewards, comments for you to interact with, and ReSteems which function like a Share on other social media. So, gaining a good audience can be quite rewarding (in multiple ways). But how to gain an audience? And what is a good audience? That all depends on what your goals are, as a Steemit member. If you want to make as much financial profits as possible, it's best to acquire followers cumulatively owning a lot of Steem Power (platform ownership), because their combined upvotes account for quite some capital benefiting your own Author Rewards. If you on the other hand don't care about financial self-benefits yet you like your voice to be heard by as many people as possible, then a good audience simply means getting as many active followers as possible. In any case, your posts should be of a high quality; either funny, provocative, informative: as long as your posts are good, you are good.
Where does all the Steemit reward money come from?, many people seem to wonder. That's a good question, and quite a paradigm shift from regular economics. In layman's terminology, Steem is built upon an Ownership Model: SteemPower as a metric is derived from the concept of Vests which can be perceived as being platform / company shares. Being rewarded on Steem means acquiring more platform / company shares. If you look at the Steem market cap that can be seen as how much the platform as a whole is currently worth (reflected in BTC or US Dollars). Your own SteemPower is in fact your ownership stake as a fraction of the entire Steem total market cap. Every day, at a steady pace, new Steem vests are "issued" via an emission system, thus forming the daily reward pool. Being active on Steem therefore means earning more platform shares. You can blog your way to fortune on Steem, and you can also buy into Steem (acquiring more vests) to boost your stake.
On Steemit numerous promotional mechanisms exist. You could ask other users to ReSteem your post so it might be read by more people you don't know yet and who don't know you. You could pay a (small) fee to Promote it, or ask for other people to promote your posts by clicking at the 'Promote' button / link at the bottom-right side of a post. And you could pay a fee to the available "Upvote Bots" on Steemit. An Upvote Bot is an auction-style program (disguised as a Steemit user), that you can choose to send a bit of your Steem Backed Dollars to in order to boost your posts. I might write another blog post about using "Upvote Bots" at Steemit, but I want to mention using this Steem Upvote Bot Tracker written by 
There's quite a lot to learn in truly understanding the platform technology. An entire book can be written about it, there's simply too much to write about in this single blog post. A quick summary though: Steemit is built upon blockchain technology, which can be viewed as a public database holding transactions. Those transactions can be financial transactions, but also content transactions. If Facebook would become a blockchain platform itself, a Facebook Like can be seen as a content transaction as well: by liking something, you transact your approval about a user or a post's content. Steemit's architecture is decentralized in that its content is not stored on a single webserver you connect to. It's not fully distributed though (yet), something that (for example) IPFS strives the web to become. Maybe in the nearby future that will happen, via a port (hardfork) towards a true EOS architecture. A distributed web, blockchain empowered, to my perception is a really exciting new technology: it has many advantages over the regular client server architecture, such as - for example - bandwidth efficiency (why connect to a server on the other side of the planet to fetch some content that's already stored on another computer in your own house?), and a solution to the single point of failure problem faced by normal client-server infrastructures. And Steemit currently uses a technology called "Graphene 2.0", which, in short, enables faster transactions than other forms of blockchain technology. Without needing to understand the nitty gritty technological aspects of the Steemit technology, it seems wise to understand some of it. I hope I've contributed something to you better understanding it!
In the first section, I've already covered a few aspects on how to gather an audience. Those "rules of thumb" apply in this section too. But there's more you can do to interact with other people on Steem! Just think of this inspirational quote for a second: You are not what you own, but who you know (on Steemit).... Here's how to broaden and strengthen your relationship network via Steemit:
Not only is this probably the most profitable and time-efficient way for newbie Steemians to acquire some Vests a.k.a. platform shares, it's also presumably the best way to form start new relationships via Steemit. Newbies quickly discover (well, most do anyway...) it's not "really effective" to JUST write comments like "would you follow / upvote me?" (although I think there's nothing wrong with asking to connect through a comment if you really like something or someone). That's often regarded as "comment spam" by the community and something to be ignored. From a capital acquisition point of view, it's useless nonetheless. On the other hand, by genuinely commenting on a blog post, or on somebody else's comment, you can catalyze a good thread-discussion akin to Reddit's mechanisms! If people are genuinely interested in a blog post's topic, chances are they're also interested in reading all of the post's comments. I've noticed myself that by just genuinely commenting, being interactive, I quickly gained a decent set of followers in just two weeks!
Just go to Steemit.chat, create an account there with the same username as on Steemit.com, but NOT the same password you're using on Steemit.com. Even if you don't plan to use Steemit.chat frequently, it's still smart to register at steemit.chat right after having your Steemit account validated, because it prevents other people to impersonate you. Nonetheless being active on steemit.chat can pay off pretty well, because (currently) Steemit.com has no embedded / internal functionality to communicate privately to other Steemians: everything you post on the Steemit blockchain is public, always remember that! Using steemit.chat gives you a way to build new relationships by just talking to people. In only a timespam of 2 weeks, I've already interacted with some very nice people that might evolve into a lifelong friendship, who knows? Making friends, forming - and investing in - (new) relationships can bring you a lot! There are short-term benefits: your friends could upvote, resteem, promote your posts so that they get rewarded more AND be seen by more people you didn't know before. But long-term, who knows all the good things that could emerge from forming new relationships?
The same thing applies to Discord chat: just register, use the same username but not the same password as on Steemit, connect to one or more Steemit servers as I've mentioned in my Useful Steemit Tools post and start interacting!
Currently, most users on Steemit choose to remain anonymous. There are numerous reasons to explain why that's the case, but for now let's just look it this as a platform fact. It could be far more beneficial however, for both Steemit as a platform and yourself as a platform member, to interconnect your Steemit account with your other social media accounts. Say you have built a big network already over at (for example) LinkedIn and Facebook. Imagine how quickly your Steemit network will grow if you would (passively) invite your Facebook and LinkedIn friends to join you at Steemit?
Being a Steemian for just over 2 weeks now, I didn't have the opportunity to attend the 1-5 November SteemFest meetup in Lisbon unfortunately. (I just learned about SteemFest Lisbon when it was almost done.) A Steemit meetup gives you the opportunity to actually MEET other Steemians IN PERSON. Now how cool is that to form and build upon your relationship network? I might join a forthcoming SteemFest edition one day, if I get the chance / get invited!
Being creative on Steemit applies to all aspects of the first two fundamental principles. But you don't have to be good at every aspect all at once! If you excel at one aspect, that improves your success chances at all the other aspects. Let's say you're really good at forming relationships but you suck at technology and barely understand the fundamentals of it, but just enough to log in to your Steemit account and use the Steem ecosystem to your benefit. Then you could use your own relationship super powers to get educated / assisted at the tech aspects of Steemit to a level you're comfortable with. Or let's say you're female and you look really nice and it excites you to post some NSFW content like 
@scipio): What are your Steemit Super Powers and how are you using them to Make it Big on Steemit?
@ats-davis and @elear in my follow-up article