Great post - thanks a lot. I am still just lurking and commenting and have yet to do my introductory post, but this stood out to me:
"don't fire up a bot with standard comments on all the posts published, hoping they'll come back. Steemit has a few built-in spam protection mechanisms"

What are these mechanisms? I'd love to know, as I have spotted a lot of what must be simple copy and paste responses to build followers. Stock-standard comment spam, really.