Advice For Beginners (Based On My One Year Steemit Experience)

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First of all, I would like to say welcome to all the new members and I would like to say a few things before I get to the advice part. Recently, I've received a few messages on Discord where people asked me to help them out with Steemit, to teach them about Steemit and of course the classic "upvote me" and "vote me" messages... with an explenation "you've been on Steemit for a year".

I would like to point out that I don't consider myself as an influencer by any means nor I know all the tips and tricks. I am still trying to learn and I believe there is always something new to find out, read and discover. Second thing, just because I'm on Steemit this long has nothing to do with the quality/success of your posts or my opinion is worth more just because of the time I spent here.

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As you've probably noticed already, here you can find all kinds of people, with different interests and goals, different ages, religions, careers, hobbies, life stories and experiences... It has been written about everything and anything and again, I must repeat, that looking for an opinion from someone based on their reputation or time spent here, it is NOT relevant, because you can write an amazing article and to someone who has zero knowledge or interest about that subject, that article won't have a big value while to someone else it will be highly appreciated.
(Messages I received were probably the main source of inspiration for me to write about this subject and share my opinion/advice).

The end of February was my first Steemit anniversary and I can tell you that I've learned so much from other people's stories, there's a lot of those who inspired me and writing my own posts, I've also learned a lot about myself. What brings the most joy, is that I've made, now I can tell, true friends that I'm in touch with regularly and we support each other.
When I first started writing, for some time I had that feeling that my life is not interesting enough or that I don't have anything useful to share with others, but every time I would get encouraged by the positive comments and nice words and I believe those things motivated me the most and made me come back here every day.
There were periods when I didn't have any inspiration to write and when I needed a break from everything, which is totally fine.
Of course, it's great when you earn some money here, but sooner or later people recognize those who are here purely for material profit so it should just be a bonus for your effort and work, not the main motive for writing.

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My advice for beginners:

1. Be honest and write about things that you're interested in

You don't have to be an expert but if you share some knowledge or personal experience make sure it's because you really want to say something that will be informative, interesting or it will inspire/motivate someone. I wouldn't at all recommend you to write about something just because that topic is popular or someone made a good amount of money writing something similar and you have no idea about that subject or, even worse, you copy content from the Internet and present it as your own work. Those can be easily recognized and not only they won't get any support, but they will also be reported as plagiarism.

2. Be original

Of course, there are posts that are short, with a few sentences and a photo, I have quite a few of those posts like 7 Days B&W photography challenge for example. Personally, I don't mind shorter posts like this but when you want to write about some "deeper" subjects or experiences, to share your opinion, try to do it a little bit more thoroughly, feel free to make it longer and leave a personal mark. Even when you think that story has been told a thousand times, if you gove your best to leave a personal testimony, your story will be only yours and different from the previous thousand.

3. Always indicate if you're using content from the Internet

This is very important, not only because you would be a plagiarist in the eyes of other Steemit users, but because using someone else's content without any indication is not cool at all, nicely said. So if you use some photo from Google etc. or article/part of article (even if it's one sentence only), somewhere in your post write where it's taken from, leave a link of the original content - it's not that hard, right? :)

4. Be consistent

I already mentioned that it happened to me that I get tired of everything and I don't have any inspirtion to that point I can't even write one sentence. If you try to force yourself to write something, you will only get stressed out and at that point it gets it worse and you won't be able to create anything (I hope I'm not the only one who goes through this).
Of course, if you're new here, most likely you will find everything new and interesting but it can also happen that you can't figure out how all of this works, what is going on here so you might give up. My advice is to be patient, if needed spend some time reading and gathering information, leave comments so you can get to know other people, slowly create your content, find topics and tags that are mainly made for new users...

5. Don't ask other people to follow you/upvote you

I am the first one who won't follow someone who shows up on my profile for the first time and just leaves a comment "follow me". I wouldn't recommend things like "I upvoted you, now you upvote me" - no, no, no! :) The chances are those people don't even read posts and they are not interested at all in your content, they most likely have one comment that they copy and paste on every post they come across.
Always try to leave a honest comment related to the post, say your opinion, ask a question... Every time I see a comment like this, I visit the profile of that person right away to see what they write about, I give them a follow and/or upvote one, two of their posts. This is also a great way to be noticed by other people who also came to comment the same post and trust me, you will catch their by being original rather than some spammer.
The only self-promotion that is okay in my opinion is if you wrote a post on the same/similar subject and, with a nice comment, you want to let the person know that you also published something about it.

6. Use the right tags

When I joined Steemit, there was no "overload" of certain tags like there might be nowadays. Like on Instagram, where certain hashtags have few million pictures and your picture gets lost within seconds, similar thing happens on Steemit where some tags are used so often, sometimes even when they had nothing to do with the post itself. I try to combine some specific tags with the popular ones.
Try and experiment with different tags until you find a combination that you think works best for you.

7. Participate in challenges and competitions

Things like this exist for a bunch of different themes and interests. Pretty much for anything that might interest you, there's probably some kind of challenge or competition. If you need time to get around and figure out Steemit or you're still not sure in which direction you want your profile to go, find some challenge/competition and participate in it.

8. Join the Discord Channels

Discord is in a chat form where different communities have their place of gathering and it became so popular lately. First Discord channel I joined was #gratefulvibes then Balkan Steemit Alliance and recently Steemit Srbija.
On these Discord channels you can chat with people, get to know each other better, share your posts, have different discussions, exchange information, ask questions etc.
Look for a community that suits you and your interests, become friends, learn and support each other.

9. Not every Steemit journey is the same

H/ere's one example: during this one year I have 900 something followers and there's people who are here for two-three-four months and have almost the double followers than I do. On the other side, I've seen profiles that have double the number of followers than me but much lower reputation. Numbers are not relevant and it doesn't mean that, based on them, you will have less or more success.
Everyone has it's own path and try not to compare yourself with other people especially when it comes to numbers.

10. Enjoy!

I start my day with coffee and reading posts, leaving comments and answering comments. I enjoy the writing process and I am very grateful for everyone who follows me and supports me and I try to give back to everyone the same way. It's always interesting for me to find and meet new people, give them upvote and support them so they can feel welcomed the same way I felt when I started this adventure.

To finish this post I want to say that these are just some of my friendly advice that doesn't guarantee success, but I hope that will be useful to some of you. If this is the place where you see yourself and where you love to spend your time, be patient and don't give up! And remember that your path to success and new friendships here is unique! Good luck!

If you have any questions or if I missed to mention something, feel free to leave a comment.

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