One of the top questions I have seen this week is 'what tags should I use?', and this question leads into a post I have been wanting to make about voting and getting votes. Remember that all vote numbers are 50/50 to the author and the voters, and I personally split my author payouts between the @ecobanker (45%) project and @archon-gov (5%).
I should first preface this article with the fact that HIVE is not 'about' getting votes, I use HIVE to control and store my content, my journey, as you can confirm here.
That said, voting and getting votes is a large part of what goes on here, and a lot of people see the votes and want some too. Its probably way better to get votes than not get votes, so perhaps some discussion about the topic is appropriate.
First, let's check out HIVE. I remember when I first started other people were getting votes and I wasn't...and it made me want to get more votes! 4 years later here I am, getting good votes (although not @edicted level votes of course), and thinking that everything has come full circle. There is always someone bigger, and as long as you move away from square one there will always be someone smaller.
You may have noticed that a lot of votes are what we call 'auto-votes'. This is just a reality of a digital world, many things are easier to automate than committing to do every day. You too can automate your votes with https://hive.vote/ - or even build your own tool!
Some users, like @themarkymark, have regular contests to find new users to vote on, you can recommend a friend or get yourself recommended by a friend. It helps to have 'good' content, to put some effort into it. Even shitposts can be 'good' if they have some effort.
Getting auto-votes requires that someone think your content deserves a vote anytime without seeing it first. That generally means you have a writing style and a story, and that you produce content somewhat regularily with a general level of subjective 'quality' to your posts. Without these things, its hard to imagine someone putting you on 'auto-vote'.
HIVE SBI
One thing I have been careful to do over the last 4 years is build up my SBI units. These can be seen at the peakd wallet 'other' category, https://peakd.com/@ecoinstant/wallet/others, just replace my username with yours to see your units.
You can read more about HIVE SBI on its main account, @steembasicincome. The basic idea is that through the program we curate users for lifetime votes - instead of selecting individual pieces of content to vote on, we select promising users to receive votes on whatever they post. The program is fully capitalized with HIVE and run by @josephsavage.
If you want some HIVE SBI for your account, all you have to do is nominate another account, send any whole number of HIVE and both you and the nominee will get units. You can get nominated by others (through contests or otherwise) and you can also delegate HP to @steembasicincome to get temporary units as long as your delegation lasts.
HIVE SBI is post-frequency agnostic, meaning that if you don't post much, your balance will build up and be delivered on your next post, whenever that is. This makes it far superior to 'vote per day' programs that have mostly all faded into obscurity by now.
Read more about this great program here - it has been a large part of my success on HIVE, including the motivation to continue posting when 'times are tough', like they surely got during the last crypto-winter.
LeoFinance
As I look over my posts, I am definitely getting more HIVE votes on my posts about tokens, finance and crypto than posts about my farm, my car or my life. I think this is part of @edicted's secret sauce, and its that LeoFinance is a very powerful community on HIVE - its members have a lot of HP too.
I am pretty good at talking about tokens, and this fits right in with my INCOME Synergy Fund project, but I haven't been interested in changing my style of post to that generic 'crypto/future/geopolitics talk' theme. Yesterday I tried to squeeze a car post into LeoFinance, and look at the votes. They are exactly on par with votes I receive in posts about the car, the farm or my life, maybe even less.
People in LeoFinance want to read finance stuff. Its not just about using the tag, it really is about a niche of content. If you can't fit the niche, its better not to go there. There are a ton of communities on HIVE, try some out at https://peakd.com/communities. I also post in EcoTrain, but not everything I do fits there, even though I am into rural development, its not clear to me that car mechanics is 'ecotrain'. My personal last line of defense is the 'Man Cave' Community, from @brofund.
Tokens and Tags
LeoFinance has the LEO token, and if you manage to hit the niche well, you can get some nice votes. These don't generally total a lot in dollar amounts currently, but you can accumulate stake in the LEO community and participate in any future growth of the project. If you have more than 5000 staked LEO you get a purple color in the LeoFinance Discord.
If you post about Splinterlands, definitely use the splinterlands and/or spt tag, this community is quite strong as well, and if you can get a hit from the @monster-curator a post can pay off quite nicely.
As a bonus, #oneup covers all splinterlands and dcity content, but you can also use the tag to signal that you are posting about blockchain or NFT gaming.
#proofofbrain is another tag worth using, you can get some extra tokens just by signalling that you are a human and not a robot.
#archon is a support community that can be used on all types of content, especially for builders and growers, the ARCHON tokens can be staked for access to a growing pool of automation services. You can also read more about the ARCHON beneficiary voting trail here.
#ctp is a community about making money online run by @jongolson, check them out to see if its a good fit for your content.
Hive-Engine
If you are talking about a token that is using the hive-engine protocol, or even the protocol itself, you would be well served by including the hive-engine tag. This is because the hive-engine team has now enabled BEE rewards for content related to tribaldex or the protocol.
The BEE token has a pretty solid usecase in making tokens and using hive-engine services, they are easy to sell and easy to find yourself buying back. Make sure to use beeswap or other hive-engine pool interface to sell tokens like BEE, because the orderbooks suck if you don't know how to use them to your advantage and you almost always will get a better price on the swap pools. Do NOT use the 'SWAP' feature on tribaldex, use the pools to do your own swaps or you will most likely end up crying. This is another whole post I should write.
Write what you want to write.
In the end, I want to reiterate that you should not try to shoehorn your writing style into any community or tag, because its hard to last long that way. Develop your own writing style, your own 'reason to use HIVE', and use the tags and communities that are appropriate to that.
Try out different communities and figure out where there is a best fit for you. You are better off learning what you love than chasing the money, because most of what I learned I learned through grinding. The grinding has helped me out as well, because even when prices were very low, I had my own reasons to keep posting, keep building and keep stacking HIVE and other tokens as a consequence.
Endurance is more important than your speed out of the gate. Grow yourself, and just write about that.