Let me just put it out there right from the start. I don't have all the ingredients, I am not a heavily-invested account and I don't have a lot of influence, but I have been around for several years and I have seen all the ups and downs. I want what's best for Hive and I have done dozens of things throughout my time on this blockchain to improve, help, encourage and inspire others, but I have done that in my own way.
In this article, I'll talk about things I personally believe- and to some extent also knows is the best things to do. I have a background in terms of brand building, sales, marketing and freelancing among other things, so even though I am not a blockchain-guru or cryptocurrency-expert, I do know a lot of things that goes hand in hand with success.
3 Things We Need
I have said this numerous times in various ways. I have tried to explain these things in-depth and in detail multiple times over the years and I have tried to simplify it more than once. While some obviously understand- and often agrees with the things I have said, many others seems to ignore it.
There are obviously more things to it than just these 3 things I am about to mention, but I personally believe that these three things are what we should put more focus on until we see results.
Let's talk about these three things:
- Marketing.
- Optimized content.
- Engagement.
I mentioned these three things recently and I also said that it's "all there is" to it. In no specific order. I know how some people immediately will raise their eyebrows now and think "What about more dApps?" or whatever. Ignore that for now while I explain more about these things..
Hive Ecosystem
Hive has a thriving ecosystem of apps, communities & individuals, leveraging the Hive blockchain & decentralised structure. - Hive.io
We can't deny the fact that we have a bunch of apps, or dApps. We also have a bunch of communities. Some of these are obviously more successful than others and that's not surprising at all.
LeoFinance.io was probably the first niche-oriented community that really started to pave the way for other communities. They set a standard to follow and the impact they've had on users are fantastic. I personally was blown-away by the outstanding communication, the development and how the team behind LeoFinance was able to improve the community week after week.
We have 3speak for videos, vimm for streaming, a handful of games, we have actifit and a bunch of things that exists to make life easier and more fun for its users. The list goes on..
However, you have probably heard of #POB recently, Proofofbrain.io. It has become "the new thing" on Hive and it feels like hundreds of people are talking about it. I actually think that it's near impossible to miss POB-related content nowadays. That is called hype.
- Hype and buzz are two vital ingredients for success.
Just look at Elon Musk and his tweets.
That being said, people are not only talking about POB, they are also sharing ideas with each other within the comment sections of content that has been published within the #POB tag. They spend time, talk, discuss and engage.
Remember the 3 things I mentioned above?
- Marketing.
- Optimized content.
- Engagement.
So, we've actually already covered some of these things. Even though we might have done it briefly. Hype and buzz = natural marketing because people who are successful are very likely to share their success-stories with others. That's word-of-mouth marketing.
The POB-community has a lot of engagement and even though it's likely to decrease a bit over time, just because people are used to spend less time like we've seen over the years, there's still hype and buzz around the project right now. I am sure a lot of time and hard work will have to be put it to keep the engagement level up with time, just like we see on LeoFinance..
We are setting a new standard with comments. We lead by example and show that people are supposed to engage. It's a battle, but we will conquer.
This takes us to the last thing I mentioned. Even though it's number 2 in the list:
- Optimized content.
I know that a lot of people would disagree and some people think it's idiotic to spend time to increase rankings on Google, but I know for a fact that it's possible and that it will yield us great results over time. Especially if we rank evergreen content. That's how we will eventually gain traffic for free.
I won't talk much more about this, it is what it is, and people will have to decide for themselves if optimized content is a good approach for them or not. I truly believe that optimized content is a game changer for us in the long haul along with evergreen content.
We Are Doing Things Wrong
This will be the last section of this post, and instead of kissing asses, I will just tell you how it is. According to me, we are- and have been doing things wrong for a long period of time.
We have focused entirely on bringing in "the masses", but we do very little things to actually bring them in. We focus on millionaires, billionaires and investors instead of the masses.
It might be, in theory a lot easier to bring in 1 billionaire instead of hundreds or thousands of people, but the truth is that most people who are here today are probably what I refer to as the "Average Joe's".
I know that when I joined back in July 2016 I had zero experience in blockchain technology, I didn't believe in cryptocurrencies and I honestly had zero interest to learn. I was just looking for a way to generate an extra income and I got here because one of my former co-workers convinced me to join.
It wasn't until I had been here, experienced some of the success and truly started to see the amazing opportunity a place like this had I became a passionate crypto-enthusiast that was eager to contribute, grow and help those around me.
That being said, we should focus on the "Average Joe's" instead of others because that will automatically translate in word-of-mouth marketing and hype, which this place is simply built upon from the ground up. We obviously need developers, dApps and all kinds of stuff to expand and grow further, but we already have all the ingredients we need to push a lot of new people to this place.
- We just need to put in time & effort. We need to become a healthy, thriving and active place and that is done through comments. After all, we are a social platform.
Wherever you look, you can read this or similar things like this whenever you search for how to make a social platform successful, or why they are successful.
Social media platforms are a powerful tool for connection. They help us stay in touch with friends that have moved away, and relatives far removed. They help us keep in touch with our siblings and even our parents. Being able to share a short status or a photo of what you’re up to not only informs people, it makes them feel like they are part of your day-to-day life.
In addition to connecting with those you already know, social media helps us forge connections with new people. Think about celebrities and bloggers. We might not know them personally, but, they share their lives with us via social media. Pictures and status updates give us insight behind closed doors, letting us know someone’s personality beyond what the cameras see. Stories posted can go viral, reaching far beyond one’s original network, and people interact with them through comments by sharing similar stories and experiences.
- Why would Hive be any different?
The "Average Joe's" doesn't care about decentralization. They don't care about owning their own content because they've been on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for decades. They don't care because they don't need to know, for now. They just want a place to share content with others..
Hive will let them earn from their contributions though, which is- and should be in every single pitch about Hive when we are trying to reach the masses. That is most likely why you got here. You joined for the money but you stayed for the community..
- How about having an active, healthy and thriving community?
That is how we will see hype and buzz, word-of-mouth marketing and a lot of new users. That is how we will distribute tokens far and wide and that is how we will attract outsiders.
Stay away from the "shortcut" you've been trying to take for years. Step up to the plate, do the necessary work and contribute towards a thriving place.
- It all starts with a single comment.
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I like your thinking here. You make good points about getting the average person involved in order to grow the reach of the system. That in turn raises the power of the collective voice to shape the path into the future.
You also mentioned how 'we' have been making a mistake and you may be correct. I'm to new to the platform and cryptosphere in general to make a well informed judgement about that particular claim. However I would like to point out a different one that you exemplify in the second paragraph of this post. The manner in which the term success gets used. (please do not take this as a personal attack - 'we' have all done this for countless generations)
The way the term is used in that statement implies a 'universal' meaning or definition for success. My contention is that this is a far to common practice that actually contributes to greatly increase the difficulty for most average people to be successful. One of my reasons for joining the Hive community is to create my own opportunity to help others by teaching success from a philosophical perspective. A key factor in this process is helping others to understand why a personal definition is critical and the only definition of success that really matters for them. The socialized standard ideal of measuring success in terms of money is an anchor that holds the vast majority back. Another implied aspect of this view is that success is a 'destination' that one can arrive at. To my mind it is far better to see it as a description of the life one is able to live when self judged based only on ones own definition of success. In other words my ideas of success have no bearing and zero judgement value regarding your definition and life.
As I said you make some very good points and I suspect that it is exactly this kind of engagement that can create and sustain the 'hype' necessary for the system to grow and more people to discover the opportunities here.
Welcome to the platform.
Glad to see you here.
Keep engaging and you will achieve success. That is what this platform is about.
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That is very true and it's actually exactly what I mean as well. "We long for success" and "we want Hive to flourish". While people might have different opinions, ideas and approaches to get there, there is not a single active, contributing user on Hive who wants to see it fail. Everyone wants a bright future for Hive but a lot of people are not willing to put in the necessary time and effort that is required to do some of the things we actually know would push us towards new heights.
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When? I am waiting for it since 2017.05.17.
The same old mantra goes on and on.
People say "we need engagement", but usually it do not happen. Nowadays most of the posts do not get real, human comments.
First, we need engagement, engagement, engagement.
Then the optimized content. Then the marketing.
But when will the engagement come?
When people on here make it a priority and realize how it will enhance their holdings.
Instead, we have people who spend all day on discord chit chatting instead of leaving comments and engaging on chain. Hence they get their little circles going but dont engage with the community (or even a tribe) at large.
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That is a major problem for sure. You take out one of the most vital ingredients for success by moving engagement to Discord..
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It usually comes when there's real hype. We saw it in the early days of Steem. We've seen it on Hive.blog, LeoFinance and now POB as well. The most crucial thing is to continue while the hype starts to vanish. That's where I personally think that we are- and have been failing throughout the years..
People stop caring about engagement when it doesn't feel "lucrative" anymore.
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I don't necessarily think that Hive needs a dapp, but they need a better gateway to those dapps. They have been working towards it, but the majority of people don't want to have to deal with private keys or keychain extensions or separate wallets or any of that sort of thing. They want to be able to go to the App store or the Play store and download an app and login to it with their existing Google or Apple ID and get to work or play. Just like they do with every other app they download onto their smart device. Come up with that and the masses will come in droves. That is my thinking anyway.
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Yeah, we definitely need to be user-friendly and easy-to-use in general. That's for sure. I think LeoFinance has done a superb job with the account-creation in that regard.
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Yes, they have definitely made it easier. I think there is still quite a ways to go yet though.
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There's a bunch of things we can to do improve. A sweet "fix" for the issue that resource credits makes would be great.
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This. I tried to bring new people here but they look at me confused.
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There are definitely some steep barriers to the general public for entry. Some of the concepts can be a bit off putting at first.
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I brought dozens of people but none of them stayed. They were willing to learn and I helped them but they quit because they felt ignored.
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Ease of use is something that is certainly needed. We are still too complicated. However, the entire industry faces that challenge.
All we can do is to keep plugging along trying to assist people wherever we can.
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Yes, I agree, I don't think there is any one chain that has solved that issue. WAX is probably the closest I can think of with their cloud wallet, but they still need some kind of mobile app for the cloud wallet. That would be kind of killer.
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When I first learning about Hive, the one thing I noticed is YouTube has very little information about Hive. Most of the videos out there are on 3speak. Thing is if you are on 3Speak then chances are you already know about Hive.
Putting on my affiliate marketer hat on. YouTube is the 3rd largest search engine on the internet. It needs how to videos that are really basic to get started. The titles need to be stuff like "How to earn free crypto" or "Earn crypto with no money" . Those videos would be the gateway into Hive cause the search volume on the phrases are pretty high. Honestly I've considered doing it myself if I had the time.
Certainly using existing social media is a great way to get people seeing Hive and something we havent done a great job of.
However, we still lack the application that appeals to a wide range of users. We still primarily are appealing to people to come here, post stuff and get rewarded.
We need something that excites people.
In the meantime, it is a slow, one by one situation.
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YouTube would be a superb source of traffic and a great place for marketing. I have several ideas of how I want to bring traffic to Hive through videos and I would love to rank videos on google as well with articles I have ranked.
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Excellent article @hitmeasap. It is frustrating to see many good writers not using the basics of SEO. They are missing out on so much value for themselves and the network.
In my opinion, there are a few more concerns. I only joined recently and the process was extremely frustrating to say the least. Without my buddy pushing me to do it, I would have given up 3 times over with the keys and whatnot.
Then, just recently, I made my first comment. It was on an article about Hodling and I wanted to encourage the writer to keep doing that while pointing out other aspects he should be looking at when investing. It took only a couple of seconds for my first vote to roll in....a downvote from Spaminator. Just today I made a comment offering help in SEO and guess what...Spaminator is there again. He might show up here again once I click "reply". Not encouraging at all.
Maybe I should write a longer post about the frustrating processes for new people who don't come on here to get a quick buck by begging in Discord to vote for their first article. And the worst part, no matter how trashy it is, they get the money. How is value created this way?
I only want to write a comment/post when I feel it adds sth. You will never read a "well done" from me. The lil heart under the article is for that. But I want to BUY more Hive and Leo to upvote the writers and contents I personally enjoy, so they can get more.
Like a subscription service that pays you back. It gives you what you are looking for and you can reward people and you earn back...that is absolutely insane and Hive should be at least a top 20 Coin RIGHT NOW. Which brings me to another point that frustrates me. The Power Up/Power Down. But I have already made some new friends with that in Discord, so I am not gonna dive into that.
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I have no control over @spaminator and I don't know what the reason are for the downvotes, but if you're being flagged for no reason I would definitely try to contact them.
I can totally understand how- and why downvotes affects you negatively but I can't really see why power up/power down are something that makes you frustrated.
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You make some great points. Engagement is really important and it's overlooked by many people.
There are a lot of ongoing efforts to try and change that. I hope at least some of them get us there.
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It wouldn't hurt if people dropped Discord and started to use our blockchain to engage instead.
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Agreed
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Read how this all have started with Toruk
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Thank you very much onealfa, I truly appreciate your support, generosity and kindness.
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In my view, the marketing has to be app focused. I like that Leofinance is on twitter engaging and talking about their stuff. We need to get a team of people behind there all engaging upon that.
To me, it starts with the engagement. Right now, we are still trying to pull in people with the post and get rewarded model. If they dont get rewards immediately, they leave.
We need to stress the engagement. However, to stress that, we need to get that. This is where I believe it all starts.
Then we can promote come to Leofinance and get rewarded for leaving comments.
That appeals to a much bigger audience I believe.
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That's what I love with the communities. It will be a lot easier to market specific communties rather than Hive in itself.
This has been a problem since the beginning, but this is also the reason for the majority of the current users to be here in the first place. Most of the current users joined because they could earn so it's only logical to pitch that to others as well..
However, that leaves us with two things:
If we changed our pitch, or rather when people started to pitch the whole "web3.0" "own your content" type of things we narrowed it down tremendously. The "average Joe's" don't care about decentralization, owning content or not. They are on Facebook & Twitter. They've been there for years and most of those people have never had any problems with it.
We need to find some sort of middle ground in terms of how we are going to pitch Hive or its communities.
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I agree.
People leave if they don’t get dollars or friends.
Engagement is like social interaction and provides acceptance, which I think humans crave.
Acceptance into a group. Then the following created by engagement would be followed more rewards.
💪
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Well marketing is a big issue. Google and other search engines naturally put a stock higher on the priority list than our block chain. As for optimized content, I don't know but I try to add as many links internally so it gets picked up more by the search engine. I leave these links to our front-ends when applicable even when I cross-post.
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With optimized content we'll get unlimited traffic but it sure isn't easy to get to that point. It doesn't hurt to optimize some content though, because each article that ranks just a nudge better than something different increase our chances of attracting more people.
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Maybe we could use stock names as metaphors to get the articles ranking higher?
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I don't think that actually works right now. For example there is a stock name HIVE it is the number one result when you look for HIVE block chain. I think the actual company who is listed on the stock market gets higher priority.
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I dont think blockchains rank well in general. We are going to have to find out a different approach.
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Well, I am still one of those who believes in organic traffic so optimized content is definitely something I am rooting for. We have never focused on that before either and I am willing to give it a shot.
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You made it. LOL
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Hey, without telling you a lie, I had planned to talk about this, of course your explanation is more logical and convincing (which is what I lack) but it was almost the same sense hahaha. But I'm glad you said it, I learned more.
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Not sure of that..
It wouldn't hurt to give it a try though, so just make your own article. :)
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I noticed something about our publication on Medium. A lot of projects get attention thanks to Medium but we don't use it as it should.
I think we can start using Leofinance publication on Medium to submit posts written by us and drive some new users here. Newbie Medium's users don't get any reward and almost a few dozen of views, with luck. When they see their posts get more attention here I'm sure they will stay.
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Good idea.
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Yeah, Medium is a great place for exposure.
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Congratulations on the post !!
BLOCKCHAIN AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WEB 3.0
https://leofinance.io/@aggregator/blockchain-and-the-construction-of-web-3-0
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You should not spam links to your own content like this. You've done that multiple times already and this is definitely not something I endorse or recommend as it is very likely that you will get punished for it, in one way or another.
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Have a good point.
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Thanks
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Agreed I would furthermore add: "easy onboarding". I am rather new here and I got a lot of help, but let me tell you, it was not a really easy task. E.g. my very first account on Hive cannot post more than 1 comment in 2 or 3 days because he is lacking Ressource credits. That is not the way, I think.
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I know, resource credits are a really annoying thing and it definitely doesn't do us good in terms of an easy onboarding process. Good point!
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The titles need to be stuff like "How to earn free crypto" or "Earn crypto with no money" . Those videos would be the gateway into Hive
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I think you're right. We can get a lot of traffic from YouTube.. There aren't that many people willing to work outside of Hive though.
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I do agree with what you've said here. I think there is power in bringing rich investors in terms of raising the valuation of the site, but the utility itself is going to come from the average people who want more from their engagement. I think that we should continue focusing on bringing in our individual friends, the best network is one where each person gets someone else to join. Perhaps we could see some types of onboarding contests sponsored by some whales to get the average people (and a ton of them at that) invovled
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It would be great to see some initiatives or contests to bring in more people. Especially if they where sponsored by whales and/or wealthy accounts. Especially as it would actually encourage people to work outside of Hive.
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Wow! Nice article, and 48 Comments! That’s impressive engagement and hopefully some Buzz 🐝
💪
P.S.
I would love to hear more about optimizing content.
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It looks like I've had some luck recently with a lot of engagement. It's really cool to see! :)
What would you want to hear about it? :)
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DeFi is great..lending platforms...like Venus
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Howdy! I've only been here a few weeks and I try to find interesting posts to read and learn more and more about this fantastic world of crypto. It has a very steep learning curve and I've been in the IT field for over 20 years. But I think engagement is the key. Asking questions and answering others when you know the answer. I'm still trying to figure out what defi is and how to get started, but I think I've finally found the right place to get my answers.
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Engagement is extremely important, especially on a social platform. You can't really claim to be a social platform if you aren't social.. It just doesn't work like that. We need engagement.
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When I first learning about Hive, the one thing I noticed is YouTube has very little information about Hive.YouTube is the 3rd largest search engine on.Needs videos how to earn free crypto those videos would be the gateway into Hive cause the search volume on the phrases are pretty high.
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Yeah, YouTube is great for traffic, but that means that people have to work outside of Hive to push people to Hive..
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Congratulations on the Post !!
BLOCKCHAIN AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WEB 3.0
https://leofinance.io/@aggregator/blockchain-and-the-construction-of-web-3-0
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As you don't seem to understand what I was talking about the last time you did this, I'll change my approach a bit and downvote your spam this time. Hopefully you get the message from now on.
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