There's really no way around it. Your posts will not be seen when you have few followers. In order to grow your blog, you have to generate a readership.
After initially joining Steemit, you will see anywhere from 10-100 followers come in automatically. Certain users feel following every person is worthwhile, generally in the hopes of getting followed back.
Don't be fooled...and don't bother to follow them back. It will just clog your feed.
They won't be reading or interacting with your articles; and some of them will be bots. They are probably only there to try and sell you a resteem service in your wallet transfer notes:
This means that, realistically, you are going to need at least a few hundred followers (300+) before you transition into spending any significant portion of your Steemit time on authoring blog posts. Even at 1500 followers, I still find that I can not rely solely on my existing followers and I must continuously generate new and engaged followers from working in the comments and blogs of others.
You need real, engaged (or, at least voting) followers before your hard work on original posts will be consistently rewarded.
If you try to do this from the pages of your own blog, you will be faced with a chicken/egg conundrum. You have no readers, so you must write content...but since you have no readers, your hard work goes un- or under-rewarded.
That's a recipe for fast burnout.
The solution to this paradox is commenting on the blogs of others - but this is actually jumping one step ahead, and something I'll talk about next post.
Before you can go looking for followers, you have to set your blog up for success. You want to maximize the chances that users who glance at your blog for a few seconds (hopefully, after reading your high quality comments we'll discuss in part 3) hit that "FOLLOW" button.
First, you must write a killer post in the "introduceyourself" tag. There are perhaps many other users who have written better guides on this particular topic (see @TeamSteem's here). However, some good general rules include:
- Verify yourself if you are choosing not to remain anonymous, via linking other social media or images with verification signs.
- Invest any stake you plan on investing before the post, as it may serve as a worthwhile talking point and show you are serious.
- Remember to use images, formatting, etc.
- Don't pigeonhole yourself, but try to mention what you intend to post about, or your expertise.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, try to highlight what you want to bring to the table at Steemit over what you want to get from Steemit.
Follow that up with a couple of pieces of high quality content (we'll go over some dos and don'ts for high quality content later in this series), preferably of the type you hope to produce. This will populate your blog page, so that people who check your blog before deciding to follow you will see that you do have at least one page of content.
These posts aren't going to earn the rewards that you think they are worth, but again, you don't have the followers yet. Look at these pieces of content as loss-leaders - product you offer at a discount to get people's foot in the door.
Do NOT resteem any content. You simply don't want anything on your front page that is not yours. You do not have an audience to resteem to, so avoid clogging your blog view with posts that are not yours. This early, you want to remove any and all obstructions to your content being viewed by others. Even if your resteems are great, you do not want to have people clicking OUT of your blog once they are starting to poke around inside it.
If you are planning to invest in Steem, do it early. This will show lookie-loos that you are serious, and may generate you a few "Remora" upvoters and commenters. This isn't necessarily a huge help, but having a few butt-kissers around to vote and populate the comments on each of your threads is still helpful early on, even if they only engage with your content in the hopes of an upvote-handout.
At this point, you have properly set the stage for your a serious run at gaining followers. This will not take place on your blog, but in the blogs of others on Steemit. We'll talk more about the strategy I still use to increase my follower count in part 3.
If you have any questions, or would like me to elaborate on any point, please ask in the comments! I will really try to answer any question whatsoever.
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It's such important advice to minnows not to resteem. So many of us, especially when we're new, believe that if we resteem a post, our gesture will be rewarded by the author. It won't. Most of the time, the author doesn't even know. You'll almost never get a Steemian's attention by resteeming their work. But you do have a shot of gaining their attention by talking to them in their own comment threads. I've found, too, that the people I really want to know better on Steemit are already pretty busy and engaged, so it takes a minimum of a month of interacting with them for any real relationship to develop.
Great points all around.
"Most of the time, the author doesn't even know."
I have no idea when my work gets resteemed. In fact, I stopped getting all notifications months ago. I hope people don't think I am ignoring them, but I don't get pinged when mentioned in posts or any kind of pop-ups anymore. Not sure what happened.
I only see that someone has resteemed me when I am looking through their blog pages and see one of my own articles.
For these reasons, I don't find it at all tacky when someone drops into a comment that they are resteeming. I appreciate it, as otherwise I wouldn't even know.
It really is very important to keep your blog "you" at first. Filtering through resteems is mental work for your prospective viewers, and you don't want to make following you work.
I try to resteem mostly only to give a platform to smaller users with something high quality and under-rewarded that I don't have enough voting stake to reward adequately, or help with some vital issue that is often humanitarian in nature.
Thanks for stopping by, geke!
What would you say a good dollar investment in Steem would be early on or say someone with the exact same reputation and time invested as someone like me? I'm asking for a friend.
I guess the real answer depends on how much someone wants to accomplish on the platform.
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking 5,000-10,000 SP is a great boost early on. By many user's standards, that makes you a minor dolphin, and would give you close to a $1 upvote at the present time.
Even 1,000 SP puts you into much more serious territory than all the "dust" accounts, and it confirms you are unlikely to be solely an abuser/bot. At the current price of a $1, that's less than many people spend on their hobbies or vacations.
I put in even more, personally, because I was sold on the investment in Steem anyway, and had previously toyed with writing more regularly. Even though I bought at a much higher price, I've been very pleased with the results so far. It's really helped me get off the ground.
@lexiconical Your comment here is probably the best common language explanation for how SP (and its related cost) affects outbound engagement. I need to look more into the Steem price over time and consider purchasing. Thanks for breaking this down.
Thank you! In case you were wondering, the $1 area is a pretty darn solid area of support, as far as crypto goes. I have been buying from something close to $2 all the way down to $1, and my average price paid is probably still a good deal higher than today's price.
Anything near $1 is, I would say, a pretty good time to buy. I am hoping I get a chance to pick some more up before the price moves up again, but my liquidity is a bit tight.
Alright, I can buy straight through the platform, no? Or do I have to utilize an exchange in some way? Thanks for getting back to me, trying to absorb a ton of information.
Edit: I'd add, what do you think is the best way to go about what you're talking about, in your opinion.
If you own Bitcoin, you can buy into Steem directly through Blocktrades. It's a slightly worse exchange rate than buying via an exchange and transferring, but not enough that first time or small users should take the additional risks of that process.
If you go to your wallet, click the drop-down to the right of Steem, and choose Buy, you'll see the Blocktrades page. You simply send your currency of choice (BTC, LTC, etc) and they send you the Steem at time of conversion. I've used it 5-6 times, and Blocktrades has an account her. It's on the up and up.
I had looked at that and wondered how the built-in tool compared to other options. There's a wallet I use on my phone so I'll have to see what the route is to turn to Steem on the platform for me. Appreciate you taking the time to outline these differences for inexperienced folks like me.
Excellent points as usual @lexiconical. I agree you need some decent content on your blog so people will want to follow you, even if you're not getting the upvotes you desire as a noob.
I also agree about the resteems. While I do resteem some content it's not often. I also hate going to someone else's blog and only seeing resteems. I guarantee I won't be following that person.
I'm totally on board with you!
Too many resteems is far and away my #1 reason to unfollow people. It's not even that I have a problem with it, it's simply a matter of not wanting one person to be able to control so many slots in my feed. It makes my feed unusable unless I track it religiously every day.
Thanks for checking in, choogirl. See you in the Discord!
This is a great post @lexiconical. I know I am a tadpole in this vast ocean, none the less, tadpoles soon became amphibious which was a major paradigm shift. I loved the idea of steemit because of the vastness of areas where great content can be created. I have tiptoed in, and feel I instinctively set my blog up as you mentioned. I'm curious about some content I created early on that got almost zero views,but is an
Idea that needs promoted. Would you suggest I recreate a second blog of similar content?
@choogirl I had to cull some followers who were cluttering my feed with resteem giveaway posts--- annoying!!
I would take advice, I feel I am only qualified to create content on slower feeds, do I make poor posts in popular feeds or limit posts to quality?
Thanks steemians!
You should make content that interests you that you're passionate about. That will show in your work.
Informative piece, lots of points to take note of to improve my overall Steemit experience...it can be a difficult place to get around but with those pointers people like myself and other newbies can find their niche and possible earn from their social media experience...I highly recommend this piece to newbies and experience steemians who are striving to be better on Steemit
Thank you, daudi! Anyone who glances at your blog can see you've already got a lot of this figured out, too.
Repetition and refresher reinforce good practices, I am always willing to learn and add and subtract when necessary to better engage and make my Steemit experience really successful and enjoyable experience
Wise words for everyone to follow!
This is great information and will help tons of people, I thought that car in the video was going to "blow up", then at the end of the video there were kids in the backseat.
I was dismayed to see there was a whole family in there. However, I can't say that I was surprised.
Even as a guy that likes to take his car to the ol' drag strip once in awhile, that was some trailer-park stuff right there, all the way down to the regrettably stereotypical mother.
I doubt that family can afford the new tires or rear bumper, for that matter.
Spent two months on steemit and finally realised that every bit you mentioned in your post is true.
I now try to blog less and comment more.
I think the truth is I still get 3/4 of my followers from comments. However, for the most part, the rewards are focused on posts.
You have to constantly adjust your ratio to keep things in balance.
I've learnt something new in your article. thank you for sharing. Eventhough today is my 2nd week in steemit and I've been learning and reading everyday on various articles and tips and also the socio-culture of steemit community. Not forgetting to do my posting almost on a regular basis (you can check on my blog when you have some extra time). My target is to spend another 2 weeks of my time to keep on learning this platform, I've actually contemplating to invest on the SP. What would be a good advice for me? thanks
If you've already done what I covered in this post (and are avoiding the don'ts from my last post), then your next mission is to start working on gaining followers.
I'll be writing my next post on this topic, but the short version is you need to get in on HOT posts, and early, with very high quality comments. Line by line replies and quotes can show you took posts seriously.
Thanks for the advise @lexiconical. I will work on my high quality contents. I didn't make any posting yesterday because I'm in midst of preparing a series of content about the 'dying arts in the indigenous people of Borneo'. I took a lot of efforts compiling the data and hope I can contribute to at least preserve something for the next generation.
I will also work on gaining the followers as per your advice. Thanks again and have a nice day.
Very good advice lexiconical, thanks.
I hadn't heard of a "Remora" upvoter before but after sticking it in the google I reckon it is a perfect description for a demographic in the steemit ecosystem. Did you come up with that?
I haven't seen it anywhere before. Remoras have always been an interesting fish to me, so the name has always stuck with me.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone else had used it before, though. It's getting harder and harder to come up with a truly original idea on this ol' mud ball we call Earth.
Well kudos to you then. Considering we have whales, orcas, dolphins, minnows and red fish in the vocabulary I think remora fits in with the theme well and the term is worth getting it out there.
I mean they are not what I would call bad actors, but its also not exactly the sort of parasitic behaviour that we really want to encourage either?
"I mean they are not what I would call bad actors, but its also not exactly the sort of parasitic behaviour that we really want to encourage either?"
I think if we really think about it, it just feels scummier than it actually is. The truth is, many of us are here only because of the rewards. Otherwise, we would be posting and commenting on the Reddit of some other cryptocurrency with other interesting features, like Monero.
These "remoras" are just users who chose to "filter" by, say, wallet size first when deciding who to follow. I used that as a reason to follow some people early on, though partly because I thought these users would also be "the big players to know".
If they are attempting to vote/comment and gain votes, we may as well let their efforts stand on their own merits rather than judge them on their intentions (which we have to interpret). If they leave bad comments, ignore them. If they are mediocre, give out token upvotes. Some will learn and contribute, others can be ignored and are still better than spam, bots, or a wall of silence in your comments.
Well the potential rewards are one reason to be here, but I also really like the idea of being on a platform which isn't owned by some corporate and is instead effectively community owned and managed. Maybe I am in the minority with that attitude though.
I always make a point of trying to reply and upvote to everyone who comments on my posts and sometimes it isn't obvious which ones are spam when complements can be so generic, I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. But yes, I do wonder sometimes if people are attracted to my SP or if they genuinely like my material. It's one of the things I've always had an issue with in Real Life is avoiding gold diggers and thieves by dressing like a bum. I can't do that here though because there are no secrets on the steem blockchain.
"I also really like the idea of being on a platform which isn't owned by some corporate and is instead effectively community owned and managed. Maybe I am in the minority with that attitude though."
Not at all. I used to write more about all the cool advantages of Steemit, for example, the applications to future historical study.
However, the rewards are by far the most obvious and widely-appealing factor. The vast majority of people on Facebook legitimately do not care they are censored and tracked.
"I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt."
That's been working fine for me, too. You start to get good at picking out the fake bot comments, and the rest are obvious.
Sounds like I should have a dig through some of your older material. I'll add that to my TODO list for the week :)
This is seriously a very good post for newbies. I wish i had this read before i do many things by trial and error.
Thank you very much! I hope it will be helpful to the new minnows filtering in every day!
You are ABSOLUTELY right! Seeking for people to follow you just by writing articles and not commenting on other people's posts is like setting up a business waiting for it to make you a trillion dollars per day!
"make you a trillion dollars per day!"
Now that you mention it, that does sound like a pretty sweet gig...
Where do I sign up?
Good advice, I'm always taking things in and trying different strategies.
very good post.....
Thank you for your support.
Great post, very good tips.
Thank you!
Great post, very good tips.
Thank you!
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