Hi everyone,
Today marks my 17th day on Steemit, and I thought this would be a nice moment to reflect on the past two weeks and share with you the thought of a Minnow trying to become a Dolphin (let's be realistic here, the road to becoming a whale isn't in my immediate future). The most important things I've learned:
Maybe this will be a very logical first lesson, but I think it's necessary to start with this one though. Steemit is a blogging-platform which distinguishes itself from it's competition by adding monetarily value to every interaction we have with the platform. Every blog post we make, every comment we post can get upvoted and as therefore gain some revenue. That's appealing for a lot of people, and as a consequence I see a lot of people try to find the fastest, easiest way to that revenue. People place kind but useless comments (like "I like your picture, good job!") in the hopes of getting an easy upvote. People consciously use wrong tags for their blog posts to reach a bigger audience. People tyhink of quantity above quality, because taking hours to write a blogpost which doesn't attract enough people is seen as a waste of time.
Steemians are so occupied with earning money that they seem to have lost sense about the real reason we signed up in the first place: to make blogs, to create a following, to read other blogs and learn from them, open up discussions about the things we've read and exchange our viewpoint on different topics. That's what this platform should be about. That's what your motivation should come from. Money is a nice extra, nothing more. Priorities should be reconsidered by many, in my opinion.
This is something I can't stress enough. In the first few days on Steemit I tried to read a lot of guides and instructional blogs. While there's a lot of great information to be found about the basics of Steemit, there's also a lot of crap to be found. In one of the guides I read something like this:
"As a new member on Steemit, you should follow the top 150 members with the highest grossing articles. Every time they publish an article, try to upvote it after +- 20-30 minutes. This way you get the best curation rewards"
I'm sorry, but this isn't good advice. Maybe it will get you some easy money, but again, this is not what this platform is or should be about. With tips like these, people will get a feed full of articles they don't even read, and they have no connection with the platform whatsoever. Also: I don't see how people would enjoy this process.
Safe to say I didn't follow that advice. Instead, I focused my time the first few days on researching bloggers which I wanted to follow. These were my criteria:
First I searched for the tags that interested me, in my case they were philosophy, crypto, motivation, psychology, art etc. There I clicked on the titles that stood out, that tickled my curiousity. If the article was well written, I would see if the author interacted with his followers. Does he respond to the replies in the comment section? Does he upvote the comments of the users that put time and effort in their responses? Steemit rewards interaction, but if the author of an article doesn't even try to interact with their followers, you could pose the question if it's worthy of following the author at all.
So interaction with the followers was a big criteria for me. Another criteria I looked for was the amount of SP someone had on the platform. If you have to start from 0, it's extremely helpful to receive upvotes worth 0.05 - 0.10$ to gain some SBD and SP. It's not much, but every little bit counts. Especially when you're just starting out
By following these two criteria I had found around 40 bloggers which I closely followed. I read every article of them (at least every article they wrote inside my field of interests) and I took my time to think about the purpose of the blog and give my input. I thought about my replies and tried to gain something from them. Again, i'm not talking about financial gains, I'm talking about sharing experiences, getting a different viewpoint on certain areas etc. Money comes later. By closely and actively interacting with people, I quickly started to get some attention and people even started following my blog. And step by step a little money came in.
I also had the luck of finding 
As you gain a following by commenting so much and gaining some visibility by doing so, I think it's wise to write a blog every now and then to keep a close interaction with your followers. Again, if they took the time and effort to read and comment on your article, reward them for it. Maybe your upvotes aren't worth much in the beginning, but upvote them nevertheless. Let them know you appreciate their input. Respond to them. It's the least you can do.
Not only your followers will read your article of course. try to gain maximum visibility by using the right tags. Use ocd-resteem and curie if you think you're article of worthy of a resteem by these big curators. Try and join a community via discord with who you can share your article and you can support eachother. It's these little things that will increase your audience. But stay realistic. My articles get around 0.50SBD in profit, and the amount of comments vary on the topic I write about. I'm fine with that. I know I'm just at the beginning of this adventure and I take my time to grow this account. A few days ago I got resteemed by ocd which resulted in an article which will give me more SP than I currently own. Those are the jackpots that are a big confidence boost and motivate me even more. But don't expect that to happen all the time. Focus on quality of your posts, really put in the effort, and let the platform do it's thing when you decide to publish it. The only thing you can control is the quality of what you deliver, the results are not.
I'm going to leave it at that for today. Maybe i'll expand on this article a little more in a next blog. In any case, thanks for reading and until the next time!
