Yes, You Can—Eventually—Afford Fancy Ice Cream.
All the big cryptocurrencies are getting in on the Ichyrus Act again, and since they’re not close enough to the sun to remember how that story ended, I thought I’d post some more thoughts about cryptocurrencies.
I'm really blessed to have some good friends who've done well for themselves on Steemit, and upvote most of my posts. I'm grateful for it, and it's the reason that I haven't always had to strictly follow my own advice. Still, I do think there's something to be said for the masses on Steemit. Specifically, I want to talk about how to make enough money on Steemit to change your life without expecting to go viral, either by scheme or by accident.
There’s a lot of talk about how to fix the platform on the platform, much of it by people who have not been irretrievably harmed by the platform, and may even be monetizing their grievance. It’s all important, although like many important things, so obscured in a dense cloud of pomposity and obnoxiousness that it’s not always easy to see how important the conversations are. There are also lots of initiatives initiating, expanding and laying the foundations for an exciting future. These are all vital elements of the ecosystem, as far as I can tell.
What I see most of, though, is a lot of people still fixated on the idea of striking it rich on Steemit and raking in incalculable sums every time they scribble out their morning thoughts. Nothing against sleeping on a bed of coin and blowing your nose on Benjamins and getting richer just because you’re rich and all that, but I think there’s a better—or at least more suitable—goal for most Steemians, myself included:
Making enough money from Steemit to change your life in a tangible way.
Here’s how:
1. Set a goal
For example: make the Steem equivalent of 10 USD/week. Or you could set a goal of making 500 USD by the end of the year.
You can set a goal of making $10,000 by the end of the year. I have friends who genuinely might be able to do that. I probably won’t, and you probably won’t either, and you’ll get frustrated trying. So if you can bring yourself to do it, set a goal that’s achievable, but a challenge.
Right now, that means averaging an income of roughly two Steem per week. Maybe that’s intimidating to you. Okay--aim lower: plan to get to a place where you make $5/week.
It’s possible that $5/week doesn’t sound great to you. After all, unscrupulous whales and their entourages are constantly blowing through the rewards pool, using bots to suck down gallons of money and get rich on the back of flaws in the system--what about all that?
That probably doesn’t concern you. You can wrap your life around Steemit if you want, and put lots of energy and money into swimming with the whales and getting into titanic underwater fights where everyone whistles boldly in whale-speak and launches flag-poons and so on, or you can follow this blueprint and casually make enough money to make a difference in your life.
2. Keep your crypto money and the rest of your money separate.
As mentioned, 5 USD/week isn’t much. It’s enough for one drink at Starbucks. How does that make a difference?
Like this: if you wait until the end of the year to touch your crypto money, you’ll have 250 USD to spend that doesn’t affect your normal budget at all.
Or like this: use your crypto money for coffee, and you’ll have an extra 250 USD from your regular income by the end of the year.
Maybe you don’t have a job--in which case I get why you want to make more, but it should also be obvious how 5 USD/week makes a difference.
If you make 10 USD? You’ll be making more than 1% of the average worker’s salary in the United States in 2016. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
3. Calculate the value of your average post.
My last five posts average out to $0.53/post.
That averages even lower to a reward of $0.265/post
If I assume an average price of 3 USD/Steem that comes out to 0.80 USD/post.
So, if I post six times per week, and make a little extra off of comments and replies, I’ll be close to 5 USD/week.
But posting high-quality content six times per week--especially if you’re writing, recording, editing, shooting, etc. can be a fairly rigorous schedule. Most of us won’t be able to produce high quality work that often.
4. Develop and implement simple strategies for meeting your goal
Here are two utterly simple strategies that are--nevertheless--pretty hard to follow.
A. Post as often as you can generate decent quality content.
Three times a week is ideal, twice is good, once is a minimally acceptable level of output if you’re hoping to make Steemit worth your while.
B. Read and respond to as much content as you can, without reducing the quality of your interactions. Hang out in, and contribute to as many Discord chats and Steem activities as you can, without reducing the quality of interactions.
This is actually pretty important, and it ties into the first recommendation. The more often you post, the more people will see your posts and comment or upvote them, or follow you. Again, this is the step that having successful friends has allowed me to slack on--because I already knew some people with an upvote worth more than $0.01. But I've met some more.
Frequency and volume are key, but so is moderation. The more often you post, the more often your friends and fellow Steemians will upvote your content…to a point. The higher the quality of your content, the more your friends and fellow Steemians will upvote your content...to a point. The more you interact with other Steemians, the more likely they are to interact with you...as long as you’re genuinely interested in them, and what they’re doing, and aren’t just trying to spam your way to wealth.
And here’s another crucial point—the more you take your $0.01 and give it to some other struggling artist just scraping by, the less you might see in immediate returns, but in the long run, the results of gradual accumulation will mean more of us affording fancy ice cream on a regular basis, or having money for the holidays. It just takes time. Which brings me to the final point:
5. Be Patient.
Will you get rich following this system? Probably not. At least not quickly. But if you give yourself time to develop a rhythm of posting, a base of followers, and work hard to become a helpful presence on the boards, the chances are good that you’ll make some money. Enough to make a difference.