It seems like only 14 days ago that I posted on the fact that I had 7k followers. My average experience on the platform is such that I've been gaining something like 13 followers/day. It's not linear like that at all, and in fact there's a fair amount of flux between people following and then unfollowing. Overall though you take the number of followers and divide by 550 days (a rough estimate of how long I've been here) then you get about 13/day.
Here's my 7k announcement post- https://steemit.com/milestone/@aggroed/7-000-follower-milestone-post
Let's look at this most recent change
Over the last 14 days I've picked up 1,000 followers. This is closer to an average of 70 followers per day. What's changed in the last two weeks that could explain what's going on?
At the moment I'm attributing this to a few things. Some good work for the platform, being a witness, and bid bots. Yes, bid bots.
Good work
The main thing that I've done recently is host a completely baller panel discussion for the Steem ecosystem. I helped create, fund, tangentially manage, promote, and invest in the msp-waves broadcast station. I now use that in conjunction with being a witness to gather folks for intelligent discussion. My last project was to get 7 of the top witnesses and largest accounts together to have a steem panel discussion. Before that I had a Steem Growth Forum that attracted some major players and a large live audience. This Sunday I have 3 youtubers with a combined 1.6M followers coming on muh show. After that I'm looking to get a 5M Youtube Subscriber panel going and a crypto growth forum together.
I'm trying to get a lot of shit done while helping to promote minnow work (see a lovejuice post coming soon), improve bid bot function and transparency, and help run and manage the Minnow Support Project (which is up to around 5,500 people). I do a ton of shit around here that helps grow this ecosystem. So, I do good for the Steem network because this place is my digital home. I feel like I'm being rewarded for that!
I'm a witness
Being a witness on the block can help personal growth. It's news to talk about witness stuff so you have some content that's meaningful to the platform, but I think it can also come with some street cred. People on the block are more willing to listen and work with witnesses because witnesses serve an incredibly important function around here. You can be a bad witness and that won't help much. You can be a good person and that will help. Combining being a good person with being a good witness can do a lot to help you grow.
So, I'm encouraging folks to be a witness. If you're looking for free lambos you're gonna be disappointed. It's a ton of work and takes forever to make progress, but if you love Steem, this community and these people, you have some moderate computer skills, some decent understanding of economics, and can disagree with people pleasantly without calling them all ignorant useless assholes when they disagree with you then you might just make the cut and find success.
Combine good work and good witnessing and you'll do well. That accounts for some of my growth too.
Bid Bots
Ok, here's the controversial part of this. I started my bid bot experiment 2 weeks ago. I've invested thousands of dollars into bid bots over the last two weeks. I've gotten a healthy return on that investment and it's come in three forms. I've grown my follower count, I've caught some larger votes because of it, and I've made a decent return on my bidbot investments.
I'm growing very quickly and I think it's important to note that I delegate so much SP that I often lose my slider. I've noticed people on this platform like to vote for people that can vote them back. It's not quite as explicit as a well defined circle jerk, it's not quite a community, it's more like a nod and a wink that big votes will come back to them. I can't do that (at least with my own sp). My growth is impacted positively as a witness for delegating basically everything I get to community projects and new community members, but it is hampered by not being able to vote folks back. At least this way I can suggest a return will be made because I'm happy to come over the top of their vote with a large bid bot vote and at least help the people supporting me get good curation rewards.
Some of this works because people think I'm insane. I think that sbd is going to go up in value instead of going down to 1 USD/SBD. It has a few things going for it. Zero fees, 3 second transactions, our block can increase in scale 300x without breaking a sweat, and You. Yes you. We have a fucking awesome community of smart people working on this biatch day in and day out. Oh, and there's only 3.6M of these little guys. So, if you want to move money around freely, without hassle, quickly, and on a platform that will process it immediately then Steem and SBD are a good bet. If you like that there's only 3.6M instead of 260M of them then SBD looks even better.
All that is to say that people look at SBD as a risky investment right now. I understand that. We say it's a pegged currency that is going to stay at 1 dollar worth of steem. I actually think that's a misnomer on the site. We have a backstopped currency that witnesses can guarantee won't drop below $1 because we can increase the interest paid on SBD. We can theoretically print more SBDs to counter the price increase, but that exposes us to having more debt notes and a lot of witnesses don't want to do that because if SBD tanks and we have to pump up the interest we could be shovelling an absurd amount of money to back them up. It's better to keep fewer of them around. All that is to say we can keep the price from going below 1, but we can't really keep the price from going high without terrible risks, so we have a backstop rather than a peg, and that means SBD can be worth a ton more money.
That's my thinking on it, and that's why I'm investing in bid bots now even though the price of sbd may crash. The fear of it crashing has made it possible to use bidbots, promote my posts, and see a return. The risk is that it tanks, but I'm a crazy mofo with some SBD to play with and I think it's gonna rise. So, right now I'm breaking even or profitting on the bidbot by accepting the risk SBD tanks, and if I'm right I'm going to make an assload of money while having promoted my posts, gained followers, and caught some extra large whale votes for the effort.
Here's my experiment: https://steemit.com/bidbot/@aggroed/a-one-week-experiment-putting-bidbots-to-good-use-by-upvoting-my-posts-at-around-the-6-day-mark. I think it's gone pretty well. We'll see though if I'm left holding a ton of SBDs worth only 1 USD (cause then I'd have lost a lot of money), but at the very least I've certainly fueled growth on this account by the bid bot experiment.
How'd I grow 1k followers in 2 weeks instead of my normal 12?
Good work for the block, good witnessing, and a large investment in bid bots
There's a financial risk to bid bots
Just to be clear. There's a financial risk to using bid bots. SBD may very well crash, and if it does you'll lose a lot of cash if you have a large bid into one. So, be careful. You should be using steembottracker.com to help you make smart bids. I'm gonna post a tutorial on that later tonight or tomorrow. But bidbotting is a little like gambling and if you have to use SBD to pay rent or feed your family I would highly discourage it for large votes. Just be careful with your money please.
Mainly Thank You!
I guess I just want to continue to say thank you for your support. It's one of the most exceptional honors of my life to represent this community as a witness, on the radio, and in my beloved PAlnet and MSP community. Thanks for following me. Thanks for voting me. Thanks for letting me be a part of this exceptional place.
I hope my insights on the last 2 weeks are helpful to you and yours as you consider how you might help the network, grow your account, think about running a witness campaign if you're not already doing it, and use bid bots as a force for good on the platform. And to all my new followers let me extend an extremely grateful high five! Good times and here's hoping you learn something about this place that helps you and it grow!