If you joined steem on the recommendation of a friend or relative that by joining and posting on steem you can make money with steem, I am sorry to bust your bubble. It is not that easy unless you already have a lot of friends in steem who are willing to upvote you. But, take heart, there are ways to get free upvotes, even if you don't have any friends who are willing to upvote your posts and you don't have any money to buy upvotes from upvote bots. By the way buying upvotes is a losing proposition nowadays.
There are some community initiatives that help steem newbies (Minnows) to get free upvotes. One of them is @upvotebank. I use their service and get free upvotes for all my posts. If you are a newbie first you have to make some posts with original content(not copy and paste posts). You can find the guidelines to join them in their daily upvote report posts. Here is the link for their blog post: https://steemit.com/@upvotebank
Another one is a steem faucet - The crypto Faucet.
The crypto faucet - thecryptofaucet.com - is offering free steem every 24 hours for viewing a couple of ads that takes only 2-3 minutes. They also give you the possibility of earning other cryptocurrencies - Dogecoin, Litecoin, Tron, Digibyte, Bean Cash, Bytecoin, Siacoin and Verge.
To make sure that they are a legitimate operation, I have already made some withdrawals. The withdrawals are sent directly to your steem wallet and almost instantaneous.
This is a great service for minnows because your earning does not depend on your steem power, voting power or resource credits and you don't have to make a blog post in steem blockchain.
Here is the signup link for the crypto faucet: https://www.thecryptofaucet.com/?r=24137