My comment - Also posted on his post : )

Reputation has always been a little confusing in how it plays out in the Steemit ecosystem. If you're a newbie you might find yourself getting discouraged when your reputation gets to about 50 or so, and then you don't see changes for a while. Reputation is harder to acquire the higher it goes so don't get discouraged if you don't see it move for a while!

You mentioned commenting on other people's posts, and that's a great tip! There's a lot of steemit users like Cryptoctopus who like to reward users for making great comments on their posts. My vote isn't worth near as much as his, but I like to upvote people who comment on my blogs just the same.

Here's another one though. If you're new and struggling try contributing to Utopian.io! They manually approve all their contributions. So if you make something valuable somebody is guaranteed to see it! You're not going to get that offer anywhere else on Steemit. This can really help you out if you're struggling to get your account noticed and raise your rep! :-)