How to make money with STEEMIT

STEEMIT is a new social network where bloggers and commenters are paid for the amount of upvotes (they are like Facebook’s “likes”) they receive from the registered users. In order to ensure a fair social platform its founders tried to eliminate bots and “haters” by implementing a reputation system which determines how much your vote is worth.
The policy of the platform and the founding company is to be owned by the workers (bloggers and commenters) per the ‘fair share’ relation for the work they have put into the platform – be it for ideas, code implementation, content creation or content curation (users are paid to play admins). By principle this is a great idea which has already been used in communism and socialism. But as we all know the reality is usually far from the theoretical principle and we also know what happened to countries utilizing those ideologies. However some modern companies and associations do use similar models and seem to be doing OK so STEEMIT might have a shot at making this work.
Unfortunately the above mentioned reputation system combined with this ownership model creates a very complex payout algorithm which few seem to understand at the moment. This brings a lot of confusion and speculation among the users and non-users alike. Added to this users get paid in STEEMIT’s own cryptocurrency which is new and hence undergoes a lot of speculation and value fluctuation.
The main bait of STEEMIT is that a small time blogger can get paid large sums for a relatively short text which he can write in under 2 hours. In fact since STEEMIT has gone public well over 2 months ago several people have earned several thousand USD every day. Occasionally people even earn over $15 000 for a single post.
Even more, hundreds to thousands of USD are paid to individuals every day for content curation. Imagine getting $1000 for liking a post or a comment…
It is really like playing Lotto, except that the “tickets” are much more expensive. Technically there are no ‘’tickets’’ here however if you want substantial rewards you need a lot of STEEM-POWER – which is like a subset of the STEEM cryptocurrency. The early birds could get STEEM-POWER relatively easily in the early days when there were fewer posts and posters but now it is much more difficult to get it without buying it. This means one would need to invest several hundred USD to become a moderately big player or invest several hundred hours to obtain it solely through posting.
Unfortunately STEEM-POWER is a necessity not just for curation rewards but also for making the big money with posts and comments. While this defeats the purpose of this platform it is a result of trying to exclude spammers, bots and low quality posts. If the authors of STEEMIT will be unable to fix this flaw it is possible the platform will die out. Authors and the community are aware of this hence we are seeing constant changes which attempt to mitigate the issue. These changes often cause stirs among big and small players alike and there is some fear that the big players could cash out and sink the platform if the changes would become too unfavorable for them..
Authors have taken precautions to prevent that by letting people withdraw only 1/7th off their share at once and only every two months – hence it takes 104 weeks to be able to clean out your share. This makes it safer for you to invest your money into STEEM-POWER but the risk to lose your investment is still considerable especially in light of the history of previous such platforms and cryptocurrencies.
Considering that the number of registered users and active posters is growing at an exponential rate, it might soon be impossible for a post to go viral (and hence earn good money) organically. Many people already feel this trend and are likening STEEMIT to a MLM or a ponzi scheme but the reality is you only need to do a little SEO within the bounds of other STEEMIT posts to get your own posts noticed.
Nevertheless STEEMIT is probably not the best choice to replace your career or even for additional income because of the gambling/Lotto elements described above. On the other hand if you are an online marketer STEEMIT is at the moment possibly the simplest way of creating backlinks as you can post anything as long as it falls within the standard bounds (no sex, drugs, violence, etc.). Considering that STEEMIT has a lot of visitors and users its domain authority should remain good and you can additionally increase your post page authority with a little on-page SEO.
Note that due to the high rate at which new posts are generated your posts will mostly get unnoticed and thus you will not drive a lot of traffic to your site. But putting direct traffic aside, with time links on STEEMIT could become very valuable for SEO especially as you are allowed to arbitrarily create new categories.
The future of STEEMIT is uncertain, it can become bigger than Facebook, or a Titanic flop. But people are making thousands of dollars per day with it so if you need new backlinks you might as well try your hand at the STEEMIT Lotto at the same time.
On the other hand if you want to really make it here keep in mind that most STEEMIT users are ‘’producers’’ trying to earn a quick buck. This means that most of the big players (called ‘wales’) – which give you most reputation and STEEM per vote – do not read nor upvote anything except STEEMIT and cryptocurrency related topics. Those topics are now of course already heavily occupied and hence difficult for a newcomer to get noticed there. Other potentially well rewarded topics are ‘anarchy’, ‘life’, science and a few others; but do not put too much faith into which topics work at the moment as the STEEMIT community is still a bit of a wildcard because it is expanding so rapidly.
If you are truly adamant on making it on STEEMIT you can try ‘’blackhating’’ your way up with a few friends. Just upvote each others posts and comment each others posts heartily to make them go viral. Note that while your reputation is still low a whale can crush your attempts at this but having a network of friends will create a safety net for such events.