BUILDING YOUR STEEMIT REPUTATION

Phase 1: Taking Baby steps
Steemit is the world of authors and curators. Authors post content and get rewarded; curators vote and comment on posts and get rewarded. This is the basic way to earn steemit. Good content usually gets rewarded well, while poor content could go unnoticed (I have seen some posts earn their authors more than $1000, however to reach such levels of earning, you must build your reputation up so as to command such attention from the steemit community.
Here are my guidelines to help you take your first baby steps in steemit:
Congratulations! Your steemit account has been approved. What next?
1. Update your profile wall:
How you present yourself to the steemit community is very important. "dress how you want to be addressed" is an age old adage that holds true even here. What to do?
- Put up a good clear photo of yourself or your avatar
- Write a brief description of yourself, so people can relate with what you stand for in steemit
- Its always good to state your location, however its not compulsory.
- Provide a link to website, blog or other internet site you want people to link to through you
- Put up a nice attractive cover page
2. Your first Post:
Now you are ready to launch out into the steemit world, the first thing you should do, is have a feel at the community, introduce yourself to the steemit community in a post, let them know the next king (or any other role that suits your fancy) of steemit has just joined the community just joking. Your first post on steemit should be your introduce yourself post. This is what a good self introduction post should contain:
- A very good title that should attract attention to your post eg. "Introduce Yourself: My name is King, I just joined Steemit".
- Put up a nice picture of yourself, you can add additional pictures if you feel like.
- Do a nice write up about yourself, talk about your interests, your work, hobbies and any other thing you think to be of interest, also talk about your goals and aspirations for steemit (This is where having a good profile description of yourself comes in handy)
- You cannot post without adding tags to your post, these are the tags you should add: "introduceyourself" "steemit" then add 3 more tags based on your areas of interest or hobbies eg. "trading" if you like trading, "bitcoin" if you are a fan of bitcoin, etc.
3. Build Your steemit community:
This is the most important aspect of building a reputation on steemit. Without building your community of people you follow, and people who follow you, it is likely you are going to feel all alone and so lonely on steemit, just like an island. There will be no one to read your awesome posts and vote on them and comment on them so you can earn a few bucks, and yourself will miss all the fun of reading posts of people you should be following, and contributing meaningfully to their posts to also earn a few bucks.

How to build your community?
You start building your community right from your first post. This first post is like your pilot episode in steemit, your success in steemit depends a lot on how you follow up on your first post in steemit.
Here are guidelines on what you should do:
- Follow every one that comments on your post
- Reply to every comment on your post.
- Check the profiles of the people who commented on your post
- Go through the posts on their walls, if any interests you, click them, read them, upvote them (if you like them), and comment on them.
- Follow people you feel like following who also commented on those posts you commented on.
- Increase your audience by visiting the home, new, trending, hot, promoted feeds, and repeat this same exercise on posts you like (comment, upvote, follow)
Keeping to this strategy of building your community is very rewarding in many ways:
- Reading others posts and making comments on them can earn you money when people upvote your comments.
- Upvoting peoples posts shows you approve their posts, so use your upvotes wisely, dont waste them on meaningless posts and comments
- Following people deepens your involvment in steemit, the more people you are following, the more likely you are to have more people following you, and this increases the audience you have when you post, and also increases the new posts you get to see in your home feed.
If this steemit guide to building a solid reputation is carefully followed, you will see your reputation shoot up very quickly in a very short time.
As your reputation grows it is also expected that your steemit wallet earnings balance shoud also be growing in the same proportion. In my next steemit guide post, i will give you the full details of all the best ways to earn on steemit, and how you should take advantage of these opportunities to boost your earning potential on steemit. Watch out for my next post.