Step One: Know Why You're Here
Why are you here on Steemit, what's your motivator? Are you here to make money to pay off your debts? Do you post in order to entertain others and show off your talents? Are you here just because you wanted to try out blogging and writing? Did you come here to learn new things? Or teach others? Are you here because you want your posts to reach a wider audience than you're getting elsewhere?
If you look at any successful person, and ask them for advice, a lot of them will tell you to define your motivator. When you make mistakes, or stray off the path to success, your motivator is what will keep you going strong, or put you back on the correct track. Even if your attempt at something is a complete flop, your motivator is what will restore your inspiration and willingness to succeed because it helps you remember why you're doing the things you're doing.
If you don't know why you're here on Steemit, how will you ever know where you're going?
Step Two: Networking
Interacting with other people and forming friends, bonds, and business relationships with people is necessary outside of Steemit for success, but on Steemit it's absolutely crucial.
But first, let me be clear about something: Sending whales on Steemit small SBD/Steem transactions in order to promote your post is NOT networking. It's spam, and I can almost guarantee you they probably find it irritating. I won't mention any specific names, but if you take a look at some of the whales' profiles you can see their transactions are littered with this incessant garbage.
Efficiently networking with other people on Steemit involves a couple things; the first two of which are upvoting and commenting (duh), but there's a specific way you should do it in order to maximize your social circle.
Don't spam upvote everything you see. Only upvote content you actually find interesting. The main reason is this; your Voting Power drops every time you vote, if you spam 50+ votes every day your votes will carry less weight, meaning less contribution to the author, and less curation rewards for yourself.
When you comment on an author's post, your comment should be valuable. Don't just say "Yeah great post!", add something to the discussion already present in the comments, start your own, or ask the author a question regarding the post. Believe it or not, I've had whales and large dolphins visit my blog just purely from good comments I've left on other people's work. It does make a difference, because sometimes this is their very first impression of you, and you want to make it a good one. This also helps you attain higher visibility besides just creating posts, and the author will appreciate the genuine feedback and interaction as well.
The Follow system is also vital to your networking. Follow people that post content you're interested in. You are not required to follow everyone who follows you, that notion is absurd. Do you think YouTubers with millions of subscribers are subscribed to millions of people? Hell no. Can you imagine trying to find good posts in your Steemit Feed when you're following 250+ people? I'm sure some people can manage it, but it's probably not pleasant. Spam following people only lessens your visibility of their possibly fantastic posts.
Do you every wonder why whales here get massive amounts of upvotes on every single post they write? Maybe even wondered how and why that's fair? It's because they gathered tons of followers through networking before they ever came here, they've already been taught to network efficiently.
The last thing I wanted to bring up in this section is making your presence known in the Steemit Chat! It could be in the post promotion channel, discussion channels or even channels just meant for fun! This is a great way to meet other Steemians aside from Steemit itself and find new content. Anything that increases your interaction with other users is an increase in your social network.
Step Three: The Content of your Posts
A LOT of people have already written posts about this, so I just wanted to touch on it briefly. The first piece of advice is stop creating posts with the intention of making money. A great post that teaches you how to do this is written here on Steemit by @klye. It's almost as if dolphins, whales, and even fat minnows can smell when your only motivation is money, and it's a nasty stank. When you're writing a post, it's okay to be excited about it, but try not to let your only thought be "man I'm gonna make so much bank with this post". Some of my best successful posts were ones I wrote thinking "this will never make any money, but I'm going to post it because it's something I like", a prime example of that is this post.
When you produce content on Steemit, it should be about things that interest you. Write posts that you would click on if you saw them. If you wouldn't click on your own posts you just finished, why should anyone else? If your post would interest you enough to click it and give it a read, there's a good chance it'll do the same for someone else.
Formatting is another crucial part of posting. If you write giant blocks of text with no pictures, headlines, or formatting of any sort, people won't want to read it, as they'll likely want to gouge out their eyes. Mix it up a bit. A fantastic post written by @minion gives you tips and tricks on how to do it. Don't let that Raw HTML button scare you!
Step Four: Perseverance
Another key ingredient in the baking batter of success is never giving up. When you become a success on Steemit, it's not luck, it's skill. If you end up on the Trending section of Steemit, it's for a reason: because you've networked and have a massive following, because you've impressed someone, you've taught people something, made them laugh. You might say "Oh I was so lucky these whales upvoted me" but Steemit is not gambling, posting isn't spinning the slot machine in a casino. Your success in posting comes from achieving one of the previously mentioned reasons.
Don't reduce yourself to believing that your success all just came from luck. Don't discount all your hard work and effort, because if you've succeeded, you've done something to earn it.
Step Four ties back into Step One, motivation gives birth to perseverance. If you're struggling, if you've spent weeks writing posts with no results, remember your original motivation, and use that to inspire yourself again. If your motivation comes from someone around you, spend some time with them to get yourself back in gear. If it comes from something you desire, like a fancy car or a mansion, look at pictures of them to remind yourself why you're doing what you're doing.
Step Five: Expand Your Knowledge - And Everyone Else's
One of the biggest reasons people click links and read posts on Steemit is to learn something. They want to learn about the newest famous person they joined, they want to learn what it's like to walk on fire, they want to learn how to draw an ear, or make a recipe, or what it's like to live in various countries.
People love to learn new things because of the human trait of curiosity, and your mission as an author is to not only help them learn, but also to teach yourself.
If you haven't written about something you recently learned about or want to gain knowledge of, I highly recommend you try it. Do some research, get your facts straight and your sources compiled, and whip out one hell of a cool learning experience. I recently wrote a post about a process I learned about a couple years back called Steganography, and it did exceedingly well. You never know what you might learn, and what other people would be interested in learning if you shared it.
The last advice I have for the final step is to also learn from the successes of others. I'm not saying go copy everything that's on the front page of Steemit, I'm saying read their work. Understand the way they write, how they format their posts, whether or not they seems interested in what they're writing about. Judging posts on Steemit is a lot like judging someone's character when you first meet them. If you met someone extremely successful like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, wouldn't you want to know how they act and what they do?
