Glad you've tested the system and found it to work!
Ya Steemit is all about the people. Your followers want to know about you and your life. Here fans become friends :)
Have a look at @papa-pepper, he's one of the heavy-weights and an all round super nice guy.

I would also encourage you to find more Steemians in your area and link up with them. I know @sultnpapper is from Texas, but I guess Texas is so huge that could be hours away :)
Definitely do a Youtube video saying you've moved over as soon as you've figured out how you're going to be moving forward. There was a huge migration following @tjkirk when he left Youtube, and you might find that a lot of your followers are already here.
Do advertise your Steemit posts on your social media, using Steemit as a tag.

My withdrawal process is SBD to Bittrex, sell to Etherium, move to Luno wallet, withdraw to my bank account. This is South Africa though so nothing is straight forward lol.
Oh, and don't move Bitcoin if you can help it. Rather buy Etherium with your SBD/Steem if you're moving it to a wallet that doesn't support sbd/steem, the fees are a fraction of what Bitcoin's fees are. You can buy ETH directly from Blocktrades.

If you don't need your cash on Steemit its a good idea to let your account build up. Your goal is to get to 500SP as this gives you a vote slider and means that you have a much heavier vote to give. You can sell your SBD for Steem using the Market, maybe just hang on a it and see if the market corrects to where SBD is higher than Steem again.

Another way to build your account faster is to buy Steem and power up. It's trading at $3.56 right now but it's gone up to $8 before.

That was a lot of info :)