Introduction
Hello steemians! I'm back with the third part to the "If I was a minnow" series. So far I've covered a few aspects of what I would be doing if I had to start from square one. You can find part 1 here and part 2 here.
I've decided to really dedicate myself to help the minnows get off the ground. I do this partially by upvoting good comments as well as writing what I believe one must do to get started right.
I want to clarify something beforehand. I am writing this article for someone "who want to accumulate a lot of SP and become a dolphin or a small whale". I am not writing this for the person who just want to post pictures of their cats and have fun. What I talk about requires work, patience and perseverance.
If I was a minnow I would...build a network the right way
Now, this is really important and I hope that people just don't read the header. Networking is the thing that most people do wrong...incredibly wrong. When I was younger, I was in direct sales for a bit and I went to a lot of networking meeting. I've seen my share of good and bad networking.
The classical "bad" networker would be the one having a conversation only in the hope of giving you their business card. His goal would be to distribute their business cards to as many people as possible in the hope that someone call them in the future. I tried that at the very beginning and it was a miserable failure.
The great networkers would do something completely different. They tried to find someone they could genuinely help either with a referral, a connections or sometimes just a good advice. Then, they would keep in touch with them, building a relationship until the other person got interested in what they did.
People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care...
So one thing that I would do for sure if I was a minnow is to find a project that I'm interested in and get involved. So if you are a scientist, you should contact the @steemstem and participate. If you want to help curate good content, get in touch with @curie. You know a language that is not english? Participate in helping apps such as @zappl, @esteem and others to have your language supported.
There are more project than I could list at this point. Find one that has good backing and start getting involved.
Find a way to be useful then tell other about it
Something that I've seen devs do is record what they have done on their blog for the projects they participate in. There is nothing that withhold you from doing that! Let's say you decide to help curate content for project @curie, how about documenting how you went about doing that, tell about your experience. What makes you consider a piece of content "noteworthy"?
Connecting and Building Your Network
Basically, you want to connect one on one with the movers and shakers on the Steem Network, by being useful and bring more value than the other minnows who just write comments and write blogs about their pets.
Get around whales and talk to them, find a way to help them and solve their problems. You will be rewarded.
If you have a good idea...start your own project
This is a great way to get attention and klout. FIND A PROBLEM and solve it with either a process, a system or a software. You will attract of a lot eyeballs...especially if the problem you are solving helps a lot of people.
There are also problems that only whales are facing. Here is an example. Some whales may not have time to write articles anymore but they have a good following and fans. If you are a good writer, you can go to them directly on discord or steemit.chat and propose to them to be a ghostwriter for them.
Conclusion
I've given you a bunch of ideas you can pursuit right now and there are much more that I didn't cover. The basic principle is this: solve other people's problems and people will reward you. The bigger the problem, the bigger the reward.