You are right to read up, it's both complex and fascinating.

The steem power, you first need to have it, before delegating it :-)

Have you discovered steemd.com yet ?

Here's your profile - you have 0.1 SP that are your own, you received this from me when I created your account. The rest up to 10 SP I delegated to you.

There are several ways to earn SP:

• one is to blog while popular - if people upvote your posts, you earn SP;
• the other is to buy steem, move it to your steem account and then power up;
• the third one is from curation (upvoting) which is the one requiring the least effort (you can set upvote rules and then let a "smart contract" upvote for you while you sleep) but also by far the slowest (especially when starting from almost zero)

In your specific case I'd do a bit of all - write a bit and find a following, people who enjoy the same things; buy a bit of steem and power up (it helps a lot to show engagement and attract people to follow you); once you have powered up, start upvoting people, it tends to bring you followers and upvotes for your own posts.