I just realized that my title could be taken in a very gruesome way, but you won't interpret it that way, right? I mean, as though actual eyeballs were... oh, nevermind. Onwards:
How to Get More Eyes on Your Post
When I was first introduced to Hive way, way back in September by the illustrious @shadowspub, she (@shadowspub) tried to tell me about Dreemport. However, I think she correctly sensed that I was already overwhelmed, so she backed off the topic. Seven short (?) months later, I finally meandered my way over to find out what Dreemport is and why I should care.
@dreemsteem does a really good job of explaining it in this post, and even has a video. @dreemport/how-do-i-use-dreemport-its-easy-
However, I wanted to write about my experience using the platform, and how easy it was to set up my account. First, let’s talk about what Dreemport is not. I expected it to be another front end for Hive, and it is not. I don’t know why I thought it would be, but that was wrong, and if you think that, think again.
What is Dreemport?
First, where is the Dreemport server? Here it is.
There are two main aspects to Dreemport: the first is that you can submit a story from any platform – Hive, Medium, or anywhere. However, the story you submit is not stored on the server. Rather, there is a link to wherever your story “lives.”
The second part is curation. You are allowed to submit one story per day, and, to do that, you have to read five stories and rank them. The best stories of the day each day receive DREEM tokens.
Why I love it
This is awesome because you can get more people to read your stories without being “known” to anyone. Furthermore, as a reader, you are exposed to more writers than you might encounter every day.
I thought that reading five stories might be a lot, but it really wasn’t. I realized I read tons of articles every day, so it is not much to read five more. I think we all read more than we know, particularly on Hive.
What are the steps to signing up?
First, you sign up using your email address and a password you create. Then, you confirm your email address. Next, you can set up your profile with your blogs including your Hive blog and any others if you have others. You can add your profile image and some details if you want to as well. It is a very straightforward sign-up process.
Then what?
After you sign up, you need to curate five stories. You click on “curate,” and the stories are presented to you. You read each one and then click on “accept” or “reject.” I suppose if you think a post is truly terrible for whatever reason, you might “reject” it.
I notice that when people read a story on Hive that they come to from Dreemport, they usually add to the comment something like “came via @dreemport.” I don’t know whether that is a convention, a courtesy, or a complete nuisance to @dreemport (getting a zillion mentions per day).
Then, after you have accepted or rejected your five stories, you have to rank the ones you accepted from the one you liked the best to the one you liked the least. That’s it. You have curated on Dreemport, my friend.
After curating, you can submit your own link. There is a quality assurance process (how do they do it?) to make sure that the content submitted is not… well, they phrase it nicely, but I will be blunt and say “total garbage.” I do wonder how they do it because it seems like this would be a highly labour-intensive process, and there are only so many hours in a day.
Conclusion
There is not much more to say. I hope someone lets me know if I missed any important points, but I want to keep this short because my point is really that this is easy. It is much easier than I imagined it would be. Besides being straightforward, it is a way to get more views on your work, both on Hive and off. While there is no “upvoting” or “downvoting” directly on Dreemport, you can vote on a Hive article while you are reading it or you can “clap” for a Medium article while you are reading it, so it is very cool.
I have known a little about the Dreemport project for a long time, but it took me a while to get around to figuring out how to use it. I shouldn’t have waited. It’s a fun and easy way to increase your readership.
There are so many cool Hive projects that it is hard to keep up and know about all of them. As I make new discoveries, I will be sharing my findings. I already have a few things in mind that I would also like to tell you about, but they will have to wait for another day.
P.S. Before then, I feel like I would be remiss if I failed to mention @shadowspub's Pimp Your Post Thursday on the Dreemport Discord server. This is another great opportunity to share your work (one I have neglected to take full advantage of thus far). I am told it is an opportunity to share your posts (from on and off Hive) as well as fun and an excellent chance to meet fellow Hiveans.
It is every Thursday at 11am Eastern, which is 3pm UTC (according to my Google Home, which, admittedly, is not the brightest little AI.) Here is a link to @shadowpub's latest post about it, which gives further details: @shadowspub/april-14th-pimp-your-post-thursday-recap
Photo is a screenshot from Dreemport with modifications in Canva by the author. The rights to the image, of course, belong to Dreemport.