Summarization of my Steemit Experience the last 5 months

Thumbnail is an image from deviantart by user NoiZe-B

The Beginning

I ran into Steemit on a subreddit and quickly created my first account ( @etheryo ) on the 11th of May. Now before you think "oh my god! Before the payouts? You lucky guy" read a bit further. After creating that account and checking out the site, I simply loved it, and my first thought was "who did my brother tell about my business idea to?" since I had literally talked about something similar to reddit on blockchain with him prior to Steemit launching. (Can prove this with screenshots from my old phone if anyone is interested (its in swedish))

I was active for a abit, then had to deal with re-locating and other irl issues and after a week I couldn't remember my password to save my own life. So after many tries, some more time in between where I totally forgot about Steemit for a while and in the end I created this account on the 25th of May. As luck would have it I started becoming active first a week or so after the payouts and when the price was at its highest.

It was very unfortunate to have missed out on the big opportunity to earn SP before it got that big, and I think the biggest reason my content lacked quality in the beginning was cause I was too hasty and stressing too much about how to catch up to everyone else instead of just doing my thing and keep improving.

Reading, Trying, Failing and Improving

I decided to take a break from hasty content creation and focused on other aspects of Steemit. For weeks I only read a lot, posted comments to newcomers and other users and learned how to improve my writing, phrasing and content quality in general. For someone who learned english from fifth grade and forward as their third language, this was of course not something easy. Knowing many Steemit users are American and the quality of content other authors were providing was top notch, mine looked like a bunch of bullcrap most of the time :P and it really took many hours to even get hundreds of words correctly onto a post with the grammar barrier and whatnot.
But practice makes the master! So I continue to practice and double check more often and ninja edit typos after reading through a couple more times after submitting. It didn't take too long and my post quality in general had improved a lot, comparing to my first attempts at posts.

Connections, Consistency and Critique

Many ask me how I have managed to get so many followers and keep the voting to my posts averagely high.
There is no direct answer to success of course, but what I have done is put many hours into the platform and learned its nature and that connections are key to your account. I think one of the biggest reasons is that I early started commenting on posts and helping newcomers out with questions they had, and over time the followers came by themselves! I have also followed many users myself to support their future content they might be providing and it felt so great being able to see others succeeding at their Steemit Experience as well!
An even better feeling to that is the same happening to users I had brought to Steemit!

Being consistent with your posting and the quality of it is also important, now more than ever with "feeds". Although I myself am not so great at being consistent (mainly cause I have other steemit projects on the side but also cause I haven't really found what I am best at yet and haven't been able to decide yet what my account will focus on) but that is something I will have time to figure out later when this platform has gotten even bigger than it is now!

Being able to take criticism is something that's really important in my books, I ask many of my followers constantly what they think of some of my posts that I spend a lot of time on and how I could improve on them. Some say its fine the way it is, some give hints as to how I could improve and ever since I have started taking their advice I have noticed my writing and posting quality increase over time.

Curation Curation Curation

Lately I have been really busy with Curating manually, but its been a ton of fun! Ever since I started my Curation Trail on Streemian with this post I have over 12 votes following me there and a few others too! Since my voting influence has remained fairly low considering the declining price its been much more fun to Curate with more votes following me and noticing the difference I have been doing across the platform and for its authors.

Oh and by the way, more projects who have been helping out the platform a lot have been @robinhoodwhale, @curie and now also @steemguild which recently had their announcement post.
These projects are very exciting and can't wait to see how much they will improve the activity on the platform over time!

This is something I felt was needed back then because of the way posts were being rewarded, and not being able to change much about it myself, the curation trail helped out a lot and made it possible for me to vote with smaller percentages, but still be able to give as big if not bigger rewards to users. To the ones that I am following, hope you haven't taken the small % votes personally, as it was just a way to distribute them more often and more balanced. The last couple weeks I have been voting around 100 votes per day.

This image was taken from Steemdb.com

Future Plans

I haven't really made any big plans on what I will do on Steemit in the future yet, but keeping what I am doing now going for a little while longer would be fun. There is no better feeling than understanding Steem and Steemit and being able to teach it to newcomers as well and seeing them improve on the website themselves. I wanted to give a big shout-out to user @kiddarko who I think is a prime example when introducing Steemit to newcomers. I showed him around a bit but on his own initiative he powered up and started posting more actively and has seen great results so far! Really proves how powerful Steemit is once you get around to know it a little bit better. :)

Some accomplishments

Feel free to check out SteemStory.com created by @roelandp in case you haven't.
Some stats from there:
Registered as account number: 9562 - 5 months ago
2176 posts and comments (mostly comments)
I own 0.0022% of the Steem Vesting Pie (3740 SP)

This is taken from Steemwhales.com

Although Steem has been in decline I am glad my estimated value has relatively remained the same thanks to my activity. :)

And ever since I have started focusing more on Curation I have noticed my Curation Rewards change a lot lately (also with an increasing wallet)

If you are a user who isn't so active with voting but wouldn't want their voting power to go to waste and instead support the community with it while receiving curation rewards, feel free to ask me for a Streemian invite key where you will be able to follow other projects votes such as @robinhoodwhale and #curie!

And I personally want to thank all the people here who are doing an awesome job on the platform and like me bringing in tons of new users and guiding them! This includes most of my witness list and many users I follow!
And my biggest thanks to @berniesanders and #smooth for being the most active whales on the platform and doing so much good for the community with their curation and support of the projects!

Hope this wasn't too boring too read and that it helped a few users and my followers out to reach their steemit goals! :)