Congratulations for your post!
I've been on the internet for around 8 years now and I got used to the "follow for follow" thing. I learned to ignore it after realizing those people will never really care about what you do and all they want is to see you follow them.
When I first joined Steemit I was, of course, welcomed by all those people who wanted to follow me for no reason, if I followed them back. I kindly refused.
Since I've been on the internet for such a long time, I realized that there's nothing more important here than high quality content. If all you care about is the number of followers you have, while you create crappy content, you won't get anywhere, and you will, for sure, not make as much money as you want.
I'm not the kind of guy who writes only huge articles, like 2000+ words, but I do my best to post at least once a day and write about something that I know or like, in order to provide something for all the people that follow me because they are interested in what I have to say.
Congratulations again for your post, really enjoyed reading it, and best of luck!