At 17 years old, I took everything I had and invested it in crypto. I liquidated all my previous crypto positions and went all in with Steemit!

**In my journey trying to climb the steps to being a Steemit whale, I discovered multiple tricks and strategies that gave me better results on my posts. Here's a partial list of theses strategies: **

Before we start, I need to tell you that not all my attempts were sucessful. Many of them looked like this:

Thumbnails:

Apart from making content that viewers and fans want to watch, video creators should follow some guiding principles when it comes to making great thumbnails, such as: Conveying the subject of the video content, Compelling the viewer to click-through to the video, Differentiating their brand.

1) Custom Thumbnail Tip: Make the Best Use of Color

Before everything, The optimal size of a STEEMIT thumbnail is 800x480. The brighter the colors, the more chance the thumbnail will stand out from the rest of the competition, but don’t go too overboard as it will make the thumbnail look gaudy and cheap. Rather than offending the eyes, do just enough to differentiate your video from others. Don’t settle for the default colors in your image. Pop the file into your favorite graphics editor and turn up the saturation just enough to make the colors stand out vs. other thumbnails. Just play with the colors filters a bit, as even small changes to the hue/saturation can draw eyes directly to your thumbnail instead of everyone else. Consider applying a subtle filter to your thumbnails. Even something as simple as sharpening the edges can have a subliminal effect on your thumbnail.

2) Connect with the Viewer: Include an Image of Face

Ensure that your thumbnail has a human face whenever possible, and if you can use a close-up shot, even better. This will help the image stand out. If eyes are the window to the soul, including emotive eyes can lead viewers into the heart and soul of your Post. The added emotion will pique the curiosity of viewers and make them want to see what caused the emotion in the your content.

3) Go For the Action Shot!

If your content lends itself to it, use an action shot as the thumbnail. The added sense of motion will encourage viewers to clink on your video to see what’s going on. The more action you can pack into a single thumbnail, the better. It will speak volumes to the viewer. The Slow Mo Guys are well-known for their crazy experiments, and along with very precise titles, they almost always include the main action shot from their video on their thumbnails. Especially if it involves an explosion or a big ball of fire.

4) Include Text to Give Context

If you plan to insert words into your thumbnail, take a look at channels like Rhett and Link’s Good Mythical Morning, who will often overlay some narrative when it’s not immediately obvious what the content is all about. Including the title or a few key words can help draw in viewers as well. Just be careful to not overshadow the content with your text and yet keep it large enough to read on any device. Using the right contrast is especially important for text. Using the wrong colors can decrease the readability drastically, and it will quickly tire the reader's eyes. Black text on a white background has the highest readability. Black and yellow is another combination which usually has a high readability, as do blue and white. Green text on red and red text on green are particularly hard for many people to read. A combination of red and blue creates a vibrating effect that can also make reading very difficult.
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5) Create Custom Branding for Your Thumbnails

Giving your custom thumbnails some consistency is an excellent way to build awareness for your content, especially if you are in a very competitive vertical like photography or crypto. Although there is definitely more it could be doing, the chain has started to use a the blue as a background, or as text color and its working well. You could optimize even further by using different types of branding depending on the content you are publishing. If you have different types of content, use a different color to help viewers know exactly what they are getting into.

6) Test! Test! Test!

One last tip is to A/B test those thumbnails. YouTube still doesn’t have a native feature (yet), so you’ll need to rely on tools like TubeBuddy. A well-planned A/B testing strategy can improve the performance of your channel almost immediately, so don’t overlook this valuable strategy. Also, don’t be afraid to replace a thumbnail if you feel it isn’t working for you. It used to be that misleading thumbnails could build you an audience. It doesn’t work nearly the same as it did years ago. Savvy viewers are painfully away of the tactic and misleading thumbnails could even drive viewers away. Be honest with the content behind the thumbnail and make sure it matches to keep your audience engaged. If you can nail down the main premise behind each of these tips, you’ll create a thumbnail that not only tells a story, but gets viewers to click on it to see more.

Posting time

I will let you be the judge of when is the best time to post on STEEMIT with this graph. This graph shows the average Steem Dollar payout per post (vertical axis) vs. the time of day these posts were published (horizontal axis, GMT).

Content

The top 5 leading topics are Photography, Life, Travel, Money and Crypto-News. These topics are clearly leading the way as all of these posts had more than 80 000 SBD paid out over the past few weeks to active steemit users. Photography is touching on 150 000 SBD.

Tags

Some of the popular tags right now are:
life
steemit
photography
kr
art
bitcoin
introduceyourself
travel
blog
food
cryptocurrency
spanish
steem
news
funny
nature
story
money
writing
cn
colorchallenge
music
health
video
poetry
indonesia
politics
love
dtube
meme
science
technology
contest
blockchain
crypto
aceh
philosophy
deutsch
photo
history
drawing
humor
animals
ethereum
steemit-health
steemitphotochallenge
fun
introducemyself
gaming

But don't forget that the top tags are changing everyday but you can guess what the top ones will be easily.

Upvote

This is probably the most obvious one but I needed to make sure everyone know that when you post, you need to upvote it as soon as you can.

Promote

Make sure to share your article on your other social media accounts and to share it to your friends. If you know people with a Steemit account, kindly ask them to go check your post out! You can even pay to promote your content if you feel like your content is of good quality but didn't receive the attention it deserved.

Apparence of Content

Make sure your content looks good and is easily readable. Don't just put all your article in just one big block. For this purpose I use: http://www.steemstyle.com/

Attract upvotes

Let's be real here: a lot of people on Steemit upvote content just based on what the thumbnail, the title and the first sentence of the post like because, this is all we see when we are just sliding through our feed. There's nothing to be ashamed of. Many people upvote in hopes of getting curation rewards so they search for content they believe will get upvoted in the future. A huge percentage of steemit upvotes comes from people who didn't even bother to read your article! So make sure to have a good post title and focus also on the first sentence as it also appears in the feed!

Make sure to upvote and follow if you want more tips and if you want to follow me in my journey to becoming a Steemit whale!