Three Tips to Start Successful Blogging on Steemit
Are you a Steemit mini-poster?
Do you post photos and memes?
Do you want to start blogging and reach a wider audience?
Never blogged before?
Well I thought I would put together three tips that helped me.
How much to write
Subjects to write about
How to tie these together - A Steemit Journey
How much to write
I – will – write – five – hundred – words – and – I – will – write – five – hundred – more.
Thanks to The Proclaimers for this introduction.
- I will write five hundred words and I will write five hundred more just to be the man who wrote a thousand words, to make my views have more.
Why five hundred words?
There are many reasons why I would write five hundred words. Then another five hundred.
Up until now I have been posting photographs and I am branching out into blog writing. Though I haven’t found yet what my favourite niche topic to blog about is.
So when I thought of writing blog posts, my mind went back to when I was first asked to create some written work. All the way back in school, in English Literature Class.
The teacher gave us assignments to write five hundred words on a specified topic. No choice given, just write on whatever came to the teacher’s mind. All these essays were to be done in classroom and handed in at the end. Five hundred words. Two hours.
Once the subject was “Experience of Summer Holidays”. At that time the scope of Summer Holiday for most of us meant staying at home and not going to school. There were no prospects for travel then and we did not care.
Another fine example was the “compare and contrast” technique. Were apples better than oranges, for example?
Since we only had oranges in our Christmas stockings that was a difficult one. Fruit and vegetables were limited and seasonal.
My favourite essay-writing disaster was trying to write an advertising piece promoting a particular brand of budget car in the UK.
I learned many contradictory and useful techniques there in that classroom.
How to pad something out to reach 500 words. Though the teacher always red-ringed the padded sections and marked everyone down for doing it.
On the other hand is the difficulty of writing something as short as five hundred words that has any substance. Refer to Blaise Pascal (and Mark Twain and Winston Churchill) who believe they need more time to make shorter letters.
At University we had the opposite problem. Limiting reports to two thousand words.
Many times I have been going through my university management and engineering reports, trying to edit them down. I learned quickly to consider all “and”s, “the”s, to remove the last defiant words from the report. Remove all unnecessary adjectives and adverbs.
So this is what triggered the idea for me. So five hundred words on any topic I choose.
Subjects to write about
So when I said five hundred words to myself I thought of the rhythm of the song “I’m Gonna Be”.
As a Scotsman, I see this song has become almost a second Scottish National Anthem after “Flower of Scotland”. Though I suspect the chorus from “I’m Gonna Be” has a much wider usage.
“But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door”
This is a song about love, commitment and perseverance through adversities. Qualities that are needed to continue in a rewarding life. I saw that as a subject ripe for discussion in this post.
Each verse suggests episodes in your partnership with your spouse, having fun, getting drunk, havering (talking rubbish), value of home life, growing old together.
The man, as family provider, affirms his willingness to go through hardships to make the partnership flourish.
When it is played most people jump up and chant along at the appropriate time.
“Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da”
I danced with my partner many times to this song, sang the words with great enthusiasm. Sadly she passed away some years ago, though I always maintained my commitment to these principles. Though she could not be with me when I was growing older.
So five hundred words, then five hundred miles. Let’s talk about miles.
I started using a Fitbit wrist monitor to record my walking miles. Before the Fitbit finally broke after a year or so, I had walked the length of India (1997 Miles). I was disappointed that the Fitbit 500 miles badge was called “Serengeti” and not “Proclaimers”. I realised Fitbit could not include that badge.
Looking into the root of the word “mile” is also interesting. A Roman mile was one thousand double paces, equivalent to about 4,860 feet (a modern mile is 5280 feet).
How to tie these together - A Steemit Journey
One mile is about two thousand steps. Five hundred miles is one million steps.
A journey starts with the first step.
My third reason for choosing five hundred words is the Steemit system. Having looked at my own photo posts I can see a disparity between views and votes. Most people vote without viewing the post. For photos, perhaps just seeing a thumbnail is enough.
So I tried making posts more colourful. Or even contrasty black and white. Landscapes, cityscapes, funny memes, travel. No significant differences for my posts.
So is it possible to get more views and subsequently more votes by blogging with longer posts?
I have tried it in my earlier posts. Though these posts were primarily photo based with little text.
So I will make it up another way. Remember that a picture is worth a thousand words.
In the world of steemit though, a picture is worth a few cents, while a thousand words may make hundreds of dollars.
Photos are from Pexels