I have done a quick study on the first 300 Steemit users, I found some interesting patterns that I think I should know about.I really think every Steemit user should read this;
Post Reward vs Follower Count
It looks like there is a 66.6330% correlation between the rewards people get and the number of followers they have. This means that 66.6330% of your post rewards come from the fact that you gather many followers, and probably only 33.367% comes from the quality of your post. Well by definition the number of followers you have decides the quality of your posts, that is pure de facto metric basically.
Quality vs Quantity
It looks like in the Quality vs Quantity aspect there is no preference. Basically the correlation between the number of posts you write and the reward you get from them is low. A correlation below 50% is mostly meaningless. This means that it doesn't really matter if you write more posts with less reward/post, or less posts with more reward/posts, at the end of the day, both strategies can end up being profitable, although there is a slight bias for Quantity over Quality, but not a lot.
Post Count vs Followers
It's still a low correlation but bigger than before. It looks like there is a slight bias, that if you write more posts you get more followers, but it's irrelevant in 70% of the cases, yet in few special cases it helps.
Conclusion;
It looks like follower maximization is the best strategy to earn more money on Steemit. And it looks like if you post more articles then you get slightly more followers. So the best strategy it seems is to just post average quality articles but many of them in a day, that is the best strategy that maximizes your follower count and hence rakes in more profit on your Steemit account.
Few Caveats:
Just make sure you don't spam, that will ruin you fast. So be moderate in your strategy.
Make sure you are not a plagiarist/copyright infringe