On Steemit, discovery of articles and people is very hard. Tagging is not by itself a sufficient substitute, and although algorithmic recommendations are not always great, sites like Quora or Medium do a better job bringing articles to my attention. Even finding curators like @classical-radio or @steemstem is difficult for a newcomer.

But a more fundamental problem is that as an author it's very hard for me to track engagement numbers, particularly coming from outside the Steem ecosystem. If I were running a Wordpress site I'd get page view numbers.  If I write an answer on Quora I get a view count.  While the Steem blockchain itself has no notion of "views", the Steemit.com front end does, and this information could be shared.  (A related issue is that there's not a lot of way to monetize engagement other than by getting people to sign up for Steem and start upvoting, but I accept that's the model Steem wants.)

If Steem was a B2C startup all those "guest" users would be treated as potential leads. Visitors on Steemit.com get a rather generic banner (at the bottom of the post) that says "Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post. If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM."

As calls to action go, that's not bad, but I don't think a lot of thought or experiment has been done about curating those "leads" and getting them over the hurdle to becoming Steem users.  A front-end that allowed guest accounts as an intermediate step, or used a tracking cookie, might allow a better experience for people not already on Steem.