You're right... we need more external sharing. My wife and I both do that. Not so many people do...
We can but keep trying. I am working on the Facebook angle, sharing with interest groups where I am admin, and on some of my pages. Next step is to switch strategy... writing something "niche specific" on Steemit that's BOTH about the niche topic while ALSO promoting (subtly) Steemit as part of the article. I did that once before, and the post ended up with about 1800+ views, so there were definitely "eyeballs" coming over.
My wife is a graphic designer-- considering asking her to make a clickable image footer that's a quick Steemit promo, and using it in all my stuff... regardless of whether it's published here or elsewhere.
It seems to be getting harder to get Facebook to load a preview image when posting Steemit links... looking into the what/why of that. Might be because I hard code all my posts as HTML.
@hilarski, as a follow-up, your post inspired me to put an article out there for "web distribution," so thanks for the nudge! So far, so good... it's approaching 400 views... my question (since you've been at this for a while) is this: Is there ANY kid of app or tool out there that allows us to determine if someone made an account as a result of reading out content?