these are my tips in general for most content creation on the internet but i’ve kinda shaped it for my experience on steemit so far in the last eight months, the more you post, the more you post your truth and more authentic pieces the more virtual doors open up to you!
[1] invest what you can afford to lose
time. money. effort — the three words that pop into my mind when i’m doing anything on the platform, i’m spending time here, i might make a little bit of money from taking part and it’s gonna take a lot of effort from me to be an active member in the expanding community, we got 200k people here and it’s gonna go huge very quickly, you’ll soon be lost in the white noise so your blogging needs to stand out, it’s not about the number of followers (but it kinda helps) it’s about the engagement of the audience that follows you already.
how much they take part in what you put out, don’t panda to their needs but just do you’re best authentic work. that’s what a blog is about for me. the ability to let your truest self spill out. if you can afford to spend a lot of time here to comment, to write and publish or even just convert other crypto to steem and build up your reputation here then you should, having been here for only eight months or so i can tell you i can see that steemit is going places, stay around, it’s early days yet and the numbers don’t lie!
[2] you are getting a free blog
i know after the initial wow of hf19, payouts and blog post monies have looked down, i always wondered if it was sustainable, i’m still learning what the rewards pool means and the recharging of it. what i do know is that i’ve always been used to be being lean online, i would heartily suggest reading the lean startup by eric ries. you can apply so many of those rules to the way that you handle content creation online in general. don’t forget, steemit effectively gives you a free blog on the steemit blockchain — that blockchain is linked on a few sites, no hosting bills, no wordpress or similar installation, no plugins to update, free hosting, free blog. that’s really worth something and i’m super appreciative of that.
[3] earned digital currency for taking part
you’ve seen it probably in other posts before but really when was the last time you got a few cents (or a lot more) for the things that you posted on the internet? crazy right? i get to play with a blockchain powered service and get paid for posting or commenting. amazing! but bigger than that earning in this way means access to cryptocurrency is available to everyone, you don’t need to have invested anything, have a credit card linked or invest anything other than time and effort. if you can type, post images and link youtube videos you can build a blog. put the effort in, be around for the long term and leave constructive, open ended comments that you want to start a dialog with other people and you’ll be on your way, but it won’t happen overnight, nothing with substance ever does. you could force a quick win but you’ll never have any legacy, legacy is important.
[4] you can transfer funds for free in the platform
do you like PayPal? no? hate the fees? ethics? just want another way, another choice? well then guess what you’re in luck because steemit has a great way to transfer funds between each other and exchanges, exchanges are easy to use and you can transfer quickly and low price out of the exchange to companies that can provide atm plastic credit cards and virtual cards that you can put into a wallet that you can use and pay with using a mobile phone (like iOS wallet and virtual wallets, best thing ever!)
remember you can transfer funds between cryptos, earn and build up steam here and start building up your crypto portfolio, that adds a completely new way of learning to save and exchanging value between each other, i’ve found so far that smaller little transaction exchanges that cost me nothing on the platform keep the value in the platform and the connections between users is increased - earn some steem, find someone that is offering #steemgigs and you'll see what i mean, you can get a lot of things done here on steemit! :)
[5] more than financial wealth here in the hive
i want this to really sink in, this is a long tail play (look it up) blogging is more than just writing ‘content’ and posts to earn money (at least on steem) there is so much more than just earning money. just to give you an idea of volume i spent maybe three years writing posts on my first blog (me.dm) and ended up with over two thousand blog posts which gave me a heck of a lot of google seo juice for me.dm and ultimately got me in front of the people behind medium.com which made them pay me five figures to buy my domain (so in effect all the posts go away. .) i never setup the blog to make money but it turned out to give me access and a sale a few years after setting it up. i never set out to make money on it, but it did give me a location and mouthpiece for people to follow me from.
i understand that the attraction of earning to post is exciting, i know you see other people with thousands of followers and making hundreds of dollars on posts but trust me, you don’t get that overnight, it’s effort, dermination, turning up each day, showing you’re process and learning, people are following the journey along with you. be respectful of that bond and that people are taking time out of their lives to engage in your own. you can find so much more wealth in terms of knowledge, friendships, heck you never know you might meet your future partner here too, i know i met mine through a video chat and that was something i never expected!
[6] build out your social legacy graph
why is it that people become you’re peers? why do you think people follow certain channels of content on youtube over others especially when it’s the same content, for instance technology shows. Of course sure, numbers count, quality of the content, editing etc all add up to enjoyable content but often the things that we don’t realise is that they started somewhere, they didn’t just turn up overnight like that, it was a iterative process.
it got better overtime, better scripts, better editing, better information and more detailed research. fine tuning, it comes with time, the more substance and history you have the more it will serve you in the future so start building out that social graph — maybe you missed the boat on youtube but you have a follower base on twitter, it will become useful to you at some point in the future, it’s one social graph that media outlets, other bloggers will cross reference when talking about you.
[7] drip feed of the top of you’re investment
i’ve never been an investments kind of person, i’ve never had enough overspill (spare) to invest it, i never really considered the timeframe of what investing meant. crypto thou has started to make me look at investing in a totally different way, i see it as access to other software and networks of people as these platforms mature, those tokens will be worth more, they will give you more curation rewards, if you get in early that shows you had confidence early on, early adopters (adapters as i call it) tend to have a more rounded picture of a platform, being in at the start, through the growing pains and as it matures.
if i’ve learned anything about investments in life i’ve realised that those with money have an ability to make more money with it. those that bought flats early on, sat on them for decades until the wave of an area went through gentrification and prices increased, selling out high when they went in low — crypto and blockchain applications are no different. just take the cream off the top over time from your initial investment, whatever that might have been, money paid in or time invested into the platform. don’t just use this as a place you can rely on an income, have multiple income streams and commit to be a member of the community. you’ll get more back in the long run. this is a marathon, not a sprint!
[8] a blockchain with many pathways into the content
steemit.com is not just the only way to get to this blockchain, this is super early days, we are very much still early adopters to this method of blogging. you can see the same blockchain from busy.org and beta.chainbb.com different ai layouts, same blockchain. now think about how this is going to increase, more applications using the steemit blockchain, more services link in, cross referencing, using it as a source of validation, transparent and open ledger, who you worked with, who you sent funds too, who you worked with, people who commented on your content, who are the people who are fighting your corner … information you just don’t get from sites like tumblr, twitter or facebook. build a legacy here for applications that don’t exist yet, time served here will be amplified by future applications. trust me on that.
[9] this is what long tail blogging looks like
long tail: (in retail and marketing) used to refer to the large number of products that sell in small quantities, as contrasted with the small number of best-selling products.
you are a long tail product. you might not realise it yet but you are, every blog post is a product, not in the true sense of a material item but it’s an expression of yourself, what value you give and take, what drives you, it’s your story and it’s the things you enjoy, to an AI it’s a dataset to work out what time of person you are and what you stand for. in the near future that data exposed will be the difference of you finding work and work finding you, would you not want to be head hunted (not in a scary terminator way) for you’re work rate and value that you put out rather than spending energy to do it the other way around?
the value of blogging for years, building up an audience of people interested in what you do is that you can never truly understand what doors are opening up, some people may lurk on the edges, learning from what you learn and share, it might be companies looking for a certain type of person for their business, maybe your work rate and the way you consider you’re outlook on life. you may never know why — nothing more surprising when someone comes up to you in real life and thanks you for all the blogging you do and the one thing they learned from you and felt inspired by, trust me. i’ve had that happen to me during a redeye flight across to america. makes you feel alive, not just existing. ALIVE.
[10] be at the tsunami edge of blockchain discussions
finally, one of the biggest for me personally — this is a real time playing out revolution, the revolution is crypto powered, it’s one of the ways that information and finances will be distributed, the value exchange is evolving and we are in another golden era of computing, we are just getting started, would you not want to be around that discover? being able to adapt you’re own life, look at your own involvement in the grand scheme of life by connecting with fellow human beings around the world.
this is cutting edge, blogging powered by blockchain technology? wow, getting paid for posting and commenting, wow. being able to store digital value in a crypto wallet to spend in different crypto powered systems, triple wow. this is the tsunami edge of a new way of blogging, working remotely, being part of an evolving digital economy. you can learn a lot here on steemit that you don’t find in other networks. dig deeper, look passed the money, start digging around and finding your people. i promise you, that will be the best trade and investment you will ever find.
