Growing your own community anywhere is very difficult. And in the platform like steemit which is pretty not famous with your friend it will be extremely difficult. So many of us start using some bots or the evergreen way of asking other steemians to follow you and you will follow them. With that strategy you may get a lot of follower but your follower to upvote ratio will be very less as you don't know what is the interest of your followers.
You may invest some money in Steemit but what would you do if you are living in a country like Nepal ( where I am from). We don't have any method to buy cryptocurrency because our banks are not linked with international banking platform. So, what can you do. Your rate of growing followers will be very less. The best way to do it is post as much as you can and post about the need of the society and touch the trending topic. Don't use click bait or other things like sexual content. Decline the payout which you can do by clicking on the Default (50%/50%) written in the left corner of the screen on your PC. Always upvote your post and reply every comment you get. Don't copy rite if you want to create your won fan base in steemit and blog for the long term.
I opened my steemit account 1 week ago and started blogging from day before yesterday and I have not asked anyone to follow me in their post and I have 19 followers all whom I don't know who they are. So if you liked my content follow me and I will be helping to growing your audience.