You may have noticed my initial previous post didn't get any votes. Votes in Hive are equivalent to likes on any other social media platform. But in Hive, votes provide you with income in Hive, that is a key difference. How does this work?
Hive blockchain, like any other blockchain, has an incentive economy behind it. Some users take care of the nodes on the network to provide infrastructure for other users to be able to use the blockchain and make sure all transactions get processed. In Hive, a transaction may be a blog post, a like, a comment, a token transfer etc, other users create tools and take care of software development, and so on.
Some blockchains provide an economic incentive to the users providing nodes, charging a transaction cost which is then transferred to the validators (this is the name users running nodes are called), other blockchains like Hive, have some inflation, they generate an extra amount of tokens in every block, a portion of that inflation is then provided to the , validators, called witnesses in Hive,that is the reason why users do not have to pay any transaction cost in Hive.
But that inflation also is used to create a big reward pool, that reward pool is used to give a small reward to a blog post creator whenever any other user "likes" its post with a vote. That is basically how you may get income from posting, so having a lot of people see your blog post is the only way for you to get votes and transform those into income. And that is the reason I did not get any votes in my previous post. So having visibility is key.
When you first create your account, you have no followers at all, with no followers, you need to start working on growing your following base from the very first day. There are several strategies to do that, but one of the most effective is to join communities, posting there, interact with other users commenting their posts and using good tags in your posts to make sure people interested in those topics get to see them. Also, using good pictures and videos is a great way to get attention.
Half of the money collected from a post goes to the creator, the other half is distributed among all those who have voted it, so voting called "curating" is also a way to get a small amount of income in Hive. But your voting power is not equal to everyone else and does not last forever. Everytime you vote, your voting power decreases and as your account keeps earning Hive and staking in the system (staking means depositing it) your voting power increases, that is why some users vote "gives" more value to your post than others.
So to summarize, you need to create a following base, to get votes, you can post in communities once you join them, community managers usually take a look at everything published in their community and vote for those posts they consider interesting. You can interact with other users commenting their posts and may get a vote in your comments (actually this is how I started getting my initial income before having a following base), and finally, make sure you do use images, create interesting posts and tag them with relevant information. Finally, your voting power is finite, so do not waste it voting easily as you may run out of it and if you do, you will have to wait in order to post, vote or comment again as resources are scarce as in any other blockchain.
A nice way to check for your account resources and voting power is to go to Hive block explorer, and introduce your account. If you check mine you will see something similar to this.
You can see I have no voting power at all as this is a new account so if I vote a post my voting does not give any amount of hive to the creator, but at least they see I like their post, the same way as in any other social media service. You gain voting power by gaining reputation and you get reputation by getting hive tokens while posting and converting them into Hive Power (depositing them in the blockchain). You can speed up this process by purchasing Hive in the markets. You can see my reputation is 25, that is the amount any new Hive account gets. You can also see, I have 45% of resource credits, that is what my account needs to be able to interact in the blockchain. Thay power grows in time but if you run out of it, you will need to wait in order to grow to be able to post, vote or comment again. As a newly created account you have no Hive or Hive Power (deposited Hive) in your account, you can see that in the top right of the Hive explorer page, but when Ecency created the account for you, they delegated (blended you) some Hive Power in order for you to be able to start interacting, that is also the reason account in Hive have a small cost, without Hive Power you can not interact in the space, so other services charge you and deposit that into your account directly. Ecency is kind enough to lend you some power for a while.
Another place to see your account info is in Hivestats.io, if you check your account you will see the amount of resources and the time you need to wait to recover them.
I delegated (lended) some Hive Power to this account from my other account and I increased my resources to publish this blog post.
