I'm not gonna name any names, but I've seen several posts lately that offer "the secret" to making money on Steem. But, when you read them, they're 300 words of hot, steaming shit. And you'll have to excuse my language, but there's no better way to describe their so called advice for making money on Steem.
Let me set the record straight:
- If you're reading a "guide" to making money on Steem, and it's less than 1,000 words, it's garbage.
- If the guide tells you "Post everday, and success will follow", it's crap.
- If the guide is only telling you to buy upvotes or sell your upvotes, you won't make significant money.
I'll also be upfront with you. This guide will be 3,000+ words long. It'll mostly cover the strategy and tactics for making money on Steem. You will still need to put in hard work. You will need to have some skills (or develop skills quickly), and you will need to have some money to invest.
**If you don't want to work hard, don't feel like reading 3,000 words, and don't feel like putting in some of your own money, stop reading now. You'll never make money on this platform. **
If you're ready to learn, work hard, and put money in, read on:
Why I'm Qualified to Write This
Briefly, I wanted to mention the reasons I'm qualified to write about this. A lot of others will write guides such as this but are talking out their ass. They bought $300 upvotes on their post and now they're suddenly an expert. Bull.
Here's why I can teach you this, without it being B.S:
- I'm a freelance content marketer and I've helped brands increase revenue by 60% with blogging and social media.
- I've grown a following of just under 1,000 in the last year on YouTube, which if you've never tried, is no easy feat!
- I'm Inbound Marketing Certified by HubSpot.
- I'm a Top 50 social media marketer on Upwork.
- And I'm in the Top 20% of freelancers on Upwork for blog writing.
Community building, content creation, and social media marketing are what I've been doing for the last 4 years. And those are the 3 things you need to do to make money on Steem. Alright, enough about me - let's talk earning some cold, digital SBD.
Step 1: The Mindset of an Earner
First and foremost, you need to look at Steem differently. If you want to make money off the platform, you need to think of it as a business venture. Too many people come into this thinking that they can write an error filled blurb on a subject they know too little about and make a killing doing it.
Steem doesn't work like that. Life doesn't work like that. If you want to earn money here, you need think like a business owner. You've got to create a product that either A) nobody else has, or B) is better than every other product. You need to then find or create customers to buy that product.
Now you may be thinking, "Product, customers? That's not part of Steem." Ah, but it is. See your product is your blog post, DTube video, DLive stream, or whatever the hell else you're putting on Steem. Your customers are your followers and the people upvoting your posts. With this mindset, you need to start thinking about how long it takes you to create content, and how much that content then sells for.
Is your blog post taking you 8 hours and earning you 8 bucks? That's terrible. You've earned $1 an hour. But, if you can spend 2 hours writing something that makes $200, it'll be $100 an hour. Much better! We'll talk more about this in a later section (Maximizing ROI), but for now, just understand that you need to view the content you produce on the platform as your product. And the people upvoting are customers. Anyone who views, but doesn't upvote is a customer lost.
I'll be referring to content as your product often throughout this post, to help drive this point home.
Step 2: Finding Your Product's Differentiators and Audience
We briefly touched on the need to create a unique product (blog post, video, live stream, photo, etc.) in the post above, but here we'll go in detail. Take a look at those consistently making money on Steem and you'll find one thing in common: they create one type of content and do it really fucking well.
This is their product. They've figured out how to create something that no one else has, or, in some cases, create something that's better than everyone else's. Take this post for example. As a product, this isn't necessarily new. There's tons of posts on the subject of making money on Steem. But, how many of them are over 3,000 words? How many are written by an industry expert with over 4 years experience?
My product is differentiated by the quality. It's over the top, and that's why it'll succeed. To find your product, you need to find either A) an unexploited niche or B) a way to consistently create content with a unique twist so that other's can't duplicate it.
Finding An Unexplored Niche
For finding an unexploited niche, look for blogs, YouTube channels, or Twitch channels that are creating content for a certain category and making money doing so. Maybe you're a road bike enthusiast, and you know that content is popular on YouTube but nobody is posting about road bikes here on Steem. Great! You've discovered a product nobody else is creating. This is only half of it though.
In some cases, there's no product because the market doesn't exist. You could create blog posts about mouse pad reviews until you're blue in the face, but if nobody cares to watch a review of a mouse pad then you're just wasting time. If you identify that there's a category of content here on Steem which isn't being written for, write a couple of short test pieces and post them with related tags. Do they get any traction or are they dead in the water?
If your test posts show nothing, it means there's likely no audience there yet. Steem is still a small social media platform and it's audience is a bit skewed towards tech related and crypto related topics. They may not care for videos on whittling.
Now in some cases, you may not be able to think of a category in which there's no other creators. No worries. there's still another option.
Applying the Concept of Unique Selling Points to Your Content
If you can't find a category to post in which doesn't have large authors already, you may be able to take over an established community. The nice part about this is that you already know that a product is in demand. But, it means you'll need to find 3 Unique Selling Points (USPs) for your content.
These need to be 3 things that make your content unique and difficult to replicate. Great examples of this exist on YouTube, where you need USPs to cut through the rest of the channels and videos producing content in your niche.
Take You Suck at Cooking for example, he's creating content in the food category which makes it to trending. That's hard as hell. He does it by having 3 USPs that are hard to replicate:
- Sarcastic/witty humor
- A fun editing style
- Original Music (The bean dip song is my all time favorite.)
These enable his videos to stand out among the rest of cooking content. Binging with Babish is another. He uses:
- Food from Pop Culture (Food seen in cartoons, movies, and shows).
- Professional Production Quality.
- A sexy AF voice. (No homo)
If you apply this idea of 3 unique selling points to your content, you'll find that your content achieves success, even in a crowded space. Just make sure they're actually unique and that another content creator isn't using those 3 USPs.
Step 3: Produce Quality Content
Now for this part, I've already shared my content creation checklist/process in another post. So, I'll copy and paste it here. Why am I telling you this? Well simple, it's one of the ways I increase ROI of my posts. Recycling older content is a great way to speed up your content creation and result in a higher ROI. I'll cover this more in the maximizing ROI section.
My Content Creation Checklist/Process
For starters, I like to measure how easy my content is to read. This can be done with the free Hemmingway Editor. So, pull that up and check the following with it:
- Are less than 25% of the sentences hard or very hard to read?
- Is the readability grade 9 or less?
- Is there any unnecessary passive voice?
- Are there any unnecessary adverbs?
- Can any phrases or words be replaced with simpler alternatives?
After this, I check a few other points for readability
- Do paragraphs contain more than 5 sentences?
- Do subheadings have more than 5 paragraphs underneath?
- Is there an Intro and Conclusion?
- And are there lists, bold text, quotes, and imgages that break up long walls of text?
After checking for readability, I like to check for credibility and what I call conversion potential. Conversion potential is just my way of saying how well the post will draw readers in and turn them into followers and/or customers.
- Is the headline too long? (Use this to test.)
- Does the headline have an Emotional Marketing Value of 30% or more? (Use this to test.)
- And are any claims backed up by facts or credible sources? (For example, if I said 50% of people on Steemit live off their Steemit income, I better be prepared to back that up with a source!)
Step 4: Promotion
Great, so you have an awesome piece of content, an audience for the content, and unique selling points which'll make the content receive plenty of upvotes. So you hit publish and you wait. A few minutes pass with no engagement. A few more minutes. You decide to check back in an hour.
An hour later and you've gotten 2 upvotes. Must just be a slow day. You wait longer. 7 days pass and you earn .05 SBD. A great post will not get anywhere without promotion, and this is where you need to be prepared to spend some dough.
Luckily for you, I've been doing some testing on performance of different promotion methods. And can help you choose the method with the highest ROI.
There are 4 basic ways to promote posts on Steem:
- Buying upvotes
- Paying to be placed in the Promoted Tab
- SBD giveaways
- Resteeming services
So far the bulk of my testing has been with buying upvotes, and that's because when done right buying upvotes has a positive ROI while some of the other methods are hit or miss at best. So, I'll discuss that here.
Buying Upvotes
For starters, on Steem buying upvotes isn't considered Black hat. It's discussed openly and many bots even comment on the posts they've upvoted. This is hugely different from other social networks where paid likes are a definite black hat tactic. Why am I saying this? Well because we may reach a turning point when more mainstream users adopt the platform where paid upvotes are looked down upon. Additionally, there may be some people who view it negatively (though as a whole you'll be fine.)
Paid upvotes are great for budgets both large and small. This actually came as a surprise to me as I thought you'd need to drop a substantial amount on a post to get any sort of traction.
Even with a modest budget of $20 USD, posts will receive a significant boost to performance by buying upvotes. You'll get more organic upvotes than normal, get a few follows, and definitely more comments. Best of all, when you play your cards right, you can actually make more money on the upvotes themselves. This is a stark contrast when compared to the promoted tab in which I routinely see posts with $200 spent on promoting it, but only pennies made in earnings.
So, if you're ready to spend some SBD on upvotes here what to do:
- Head to steembottracker.com
- Purchase upvotes from bots which have auto refunds, no ROI limit, and total bids that are lower than the vote value.
It's really that simple. The site even has bots highlighted in green that have a good ROI and provides a maximum suggested bid.
What if I don't have money?
Well, that SBD that you earn on the platform should always be re-invested when possible. Everything I've earned has been reinvested in someway or another - either in buying the tools needed to up the quality of my content, or to buy upvotes for promotion.
If you're struggling to earn SBD on the platform, you may have to seed yourself a bit. Put $20 in and reuse that money each week to buy upvotes. Eventually, you'll begin to get payouts from that. However, that still won't be enough.
No, **you'll need to be making up for the lack of money spent by putting in hard work. ** This involves networking both at in person events, and in comments. A great example of how to make comments that get you results comes from @maverickfoo who commented recently on one of my posts. Let's break it down.
First, he starts off with a compliment to the post. You can never go wrong there. Then he calls out a specific section of the post, quoting it even. This shows that he read the post or at the very least skimmed it.
Lastly, he added relevant information that I hadn't presented in the original blog post. This info was both new to me and valuable. After that he puts a link to one of his posts which is again relevant and valuable. Lastly he wraps it up with a quick comment on my thoughts regarding related subject matter.
If you comment like this every single time, you will get results. They may not be instantaneous, and you may only get 4/10 people to check out the post (based on conversion rates from similar tactics I've employed on Twitter), but at least you're getting some traction.
Another secret tactic of mine is to find and embed yourself in chat communities. Discord servers, Slack Chats, etc. are great places to network yourself.
Step 5: Maximizing ROI
We've commented a few times on maximizing ROI before, but here's the basics. You may make some money on Steem, but if you're not earning more than minimum wage after investing time and money into the platform, you'd be better off working at McDonald's. If you're here to make money, you need to track and analyze the hours you're putting in vs the rewards your getting out. I use Toggl to track hours, and then just compare that to rewards earned.
I've calculated this for my streaming and found that I get around $10/hour for some streams and nothing for others. So, I'm doing my best to find the variables which influence that profitability and then exploit them to earn the highest ROI on all my streams. For live streaming in particular this is heavily dependent on posting time. A live stream at 1 AM performs much worse than one at 7 PM!
Posting time and schedule is your first tip for maximizing ROI. Experiment and find the best time to hit publish, then create a schedule and stick to it. This is the "post everyday" that everyone seems to think is the secret to making money here. Note that this is more important for DLive content than DTube videos and blog posts, but don't disregard it for any type of content.
The next step to maximizing your ROI is finding ways to recycle old content. If you can use older content again, you've saved yourself from writing, recording, or just working on it in general. This doesn't mean you should republish the same content, but turning a blog post into a video or vice versa is a great idea! Similarly, using old content as parts of new content (like I did earlier in this post) is also a great idea.
The last step to maximizing ROI is simply to get faster at what it is you're doing. That's kind of easy for me to say, as I've been creating content for 4 years now, but I'll try my best to provide some easy steps for speeding up:
- Find your optimal working times. (I work well at night when my son and wife are asleep)
- Don't be afraid to take breaks. Watching a YouTube video could give your brain the break it needs to regain focus.
- Listen to music. This could just be me, but I can't focus at all if I don't have a song on repeat.
- Just keep at it, over time you'll find your own ways to get faster.
- Don't edit while you're writing. Save editing for a different time entirely and your thoughts will flow without interruption.
Conclusion
Look, I'm gonna be honest here. I spent a lot of time on this post. And it's not because I want to make money. In fact, I'm mostly here on Steem to stream video games. (DLive is hands down the best platform right now for streamers.) I made this post because I've seen a lot of misinformation on the subject, and as a creator with a lot of business experience I'd rather point you guys in the right direction than let others lead you astray.
So, I'm asking you to do two things after reading this post. First, upvote it so others can see it. (resteem it if you're feeling generous!) Second, identify your product's differentiators and audience. Then post a comment below with them. I personally will take the time to look at each comment and let you know if the USPs you've selected and audience you're targeting are good.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with and would love to see you all succeed here on Steem!