My Story of One Year on Steem and My Learnings

Introduction

I used to run a robotic trading service vulturespick for Indian Stock Market. Then sometime in March 2017 I redeveloped interest in crypto assets. I say redeveloped because I was among the very few who happened to know about bitcoin back in 2009. And that is because I was keenly following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, as a result of watching Cathelene Lays show on Bloomberg who used to rant about how real estate bubble is going to burst in USA. It is the press coverage of that time, full of articles about how governments are mishandeling the wealth of common citizens through the policies of their central banks e.g. FED's other central banks of developed countries famous easing policy with negative interest rates, which raised doubt in my mind about the financial management by governments. And it is then I also happen to read the famous Satoshi Nakamoto groundbreaking paper - https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.

I knew then that it is excellent concept but did not take any action to grab few BTCs. Anyway so that is that.

So when I redeveloped interest in Crypto assets back in March 2017 I thought of using my concept of stock market asset price modeling to crypto asset price modeling. Fortunately blockchain and etherscan had relevant data to do this analysis.

I used it to analyze if BTC and ETH at that time were undervalued or overvalued. I found both undervalued. After a month my prediction came true and my interest increased many fold in my concept & my prediction ability. My first analysis was published on my steem account on 12th May 2017 -artificial intelligence based cryptocurrency price prediction and trading signal

In less than a month time when I redeveloped interest in crypto assets in March 2017 - I came to know that BTC and ETH are not the only assets but there are more than 1000 assets. And in that process I happen to land at Steem blockchain. I immediately liked the concept of steem blockchain.

It was 24 April 2017 when I joined Steem blockchain based social media platform through Steemit and I was user number 149811. Today we have almost 1 mn users a nearly 6 times jump in user base in one year.

My Introduction on SteemIt

As any other user I was skeptical if platform really pays or it is simply a scam.

I made a very rudimentary introductory post about myself on the steem which was immediately commented and upvoted by some stalwarts on the steem like @good-karma, @pharesim, @furion etc.

And to my surprise I was seeing dollars 💵 on my post.

I made some more posts and after a week I saw rewards to be claimed. It is then I got bit convinced that it is for real.

And then I bought my first Steems for 1000$ @0.3$ From @blocktrades back in May 2017. In a week time rate jumped to 3$ plus and I was looking at 10 times gain on my investment. I was naive to start making projections and immediately started buying more steem starting from 2.6 but to my dismay steem price started going down and down. I somehow was convinced with the concept so kept buying more and more. My last buy in that down cycle was around 0.7 $ price.

And then it was a cruciating waite of more than 3-4 months while steem kept sideways trading around 1$ while all other major currencies jumped many folds. However, I still had faith in steem so kept powering up all my rewards and kept posting and curating.

Then sometime in November/December Steem dollar went up and up and up followed by Steem in same way upto 8$. My account value went up 6-7 times and rewards were going to the moon.

It is then I felt waite was worth.

My faith in Steem all this time remained due to

1. the reports published by @arcange. His reports showed how the number of users and activity on Steem blockchain is increasing each day.
2. Plus how the Steemit website rank was growing on alexia - https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com
3. Another important factor was Steemit is not the only platform to post but many other platform had come up to post text, video, pictures, audio to earn rewards.
4. Story of SMTs was another convincing piece that helped to remain invested.
5. Recognised globally by reputed ranking firm Weiss as 5th best crypto asset Steem outsmarted most other crypto assets. http://time.com/money/5214911/these-are-the-5-safest-cryptocurrencies-to-invest-in-according-to-a-prominent-rating-firm/

So all in all I found Steem to be only blockchain project that had a community of developers, marketeers, investors, influencers, users who were day in and day out fighting, interacting, and collaborating with each other which no other blockchain had. And that is the major USP of Steem.

How I contributed in Steem's growth?

Initially I myself had doubt and wanted to see if it works and when I got convinced then I started sharing my Steem posts to my profiles and followers on other social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp.

I directly influenced nearly 100 people to try steem platform for their social media needs. The key ones who are quite active are @renutyagi, @ajaykumar4, @kamaltyagi, @lovefinder, @ rashmityagi, @rakeshnaadaan, @ashwanityagi, @utkarshvarma, @shilpavarma, @vinitasingh, @krispst, @vineetasingh

How I evolved on Steem?

In the beginning I also thought I will simply copy paste and earn the rewards. In fact I took @cheetah comments as kind of acknowledgement and recognition of my post as the comments are bit misleading. But when it was followed by rewards being nulled then I realized that platform can not be gamed.

Again although I started posting original content but did not care much about quality.

Slowly I started paying attention to the fact that along with originality I have to focus on quality too. I am not a professional blogger but I try to have some information of use in my blogs. Yes there may be few ones yet as laziness does creep in at times. My photography has improved to some extent over last one year. Hope to keep improving.

I do not believe in I followed you so you follow me. I never encourage that. So lately I cleaned up whom I follow so that the feed of my account provides me information and content that I need and like.

My one year of efforts are summed up in below picture with reputation of 67.5

My position on bots 🤖

Almost on daily basis we see posts that complain about bots and curse their existence. I think it is completely unfair. They are essential for the ecosystem as I realized lately.

I was publishing some really good content off late but it never entered in hot or trending and I had decent size of my own account too. It is only because of the services of bots I could raise the visibility of my content. Yes it eats away some of my rewards but attention even for best content has to be mobilized on any platform. Steem can not be different.

So instead of cursing bots use them to increase the visibility of your content of which you are proud of.

My future plans for Steem

I have plans to launch my own SMT as soon as SMT are enabled. I have few ideas I am deliberating upon. You will see soon my posts on that front explaining in detail.

My suggestions to new users

In addition to other needs most users come to this platform to earn money on their content. In my view there are only two ways to earn money anywhere.

Either invest money or invest time.

And remember anybody who invest money has actually invested his time somewhere and earned that money which is invested here. So if u can not invest money then be ready to invest your time in learning required skills to excel here. But please don’t complain about somebody is earning so and so.

Here is my suggestion for not being frustrated with your earnings on this platform.

1. Calculate your current earning per month from your current professions (salary, business, professional fees etc). Let us assume you earn 500$ a month. This must be your targeted earning from Steem for not to be frustrated

2. Steem blockchain can pay u maximum around 3-5% per month on your investment depending on your content quality

3. So you need to buy Steem equivalents to 10000$ and power up

4. Now you make 4-5 posts per day and self upvote. Nothing wrong in that. If you don’t care for yourself who will.

5. Use your remaining votes to develop your followers whose good content you curate and your good content they curate. Never beg for upvote. It does not work. In fact it detracts genuine users and belittle you infront of all the other users. Self respect should never be compromised

6. Then when your rewards start coming in -accumulate them for a month or so and start using bots to make your best content visible to larger user base

All in all invest some of your money and lot of your time to succeed. Unfortunately, there are no free lunches anywhere in this word. Only free thing that is available to all of us is time that God has given to us without any bias. Use it judiciously.

Good Luck & All the Best

Happy Steeming