My personal belief is that it's not only your engagement with the community that is leading to your success, @c0ff33a, nor your promotional portrait's presence in your posts (though, I can't see how that would hurt), but the genuine voice with which you comment on others' works that shows your engagement with their passions, and the high quality of your content and posts that is truly driving your blog's growth.
While the saying goes, "there's a sucker born every minute", most active users here seem to be very protective of their time and engagement, and very conscious of promoting only quality content, and you are a person who understands this and, as such, produces top content by an honest person genuinely engaging with others.
It's refreshing and a model that all should take note of if we want to be better Steemians and raise the quality of both content and community here on the platform.
Best of luck to you in your challenges you entered, your future challenges, and all you choose to pursue, good sir.
Thank you very much, you definitely get the 🍪bonus cookie for the best comment of today's post. You can scroll down and down my blog posts, and follow that slow and struggling start where I had no idea what I was doing and just made a post - sat and wait for something to happen to it. And it didn't, so I made another - rinse repeat. I'm not very creative, I don't take great photos, I can't write amazing literary works or poems so my options are quite limited for creating content. I decided in the end I would work on what I did have, which is my experience in the coffee industry, and then just general aspects of my life. I did struggle for a while trying to work out just what was "Good Content" and what Steemit needed from me, @old-guy-photos gave me the best answer to that question - "Find the content you like and enjoy, and make yours in a similar way" And that's really what I have done, I include myself in many of my posts because where I see it on others blogs it gives a real person bond with the account - when I read @old-guy-photos , @dswigle or @ninahaskin blog when I go past the footer it reminds me I'm not reading a blog - but sharing a chat with a friend. I try my best to mention as many of the accounts I enjoy as often as I can - because it really is very hard to find content on here - just like #thealliance has helped me find some wonderful creators like @maxabit above. I'm quite sure my content is not for everyone, and that some dedicated artists and creators would just look with disdain at my jumbled up efforts of pictures and texts with random mentions of other blog posts mixed in....but if I can bring one or two people together that would never have found themselves any other way I am more then happy.