Well, finally today I've reached 50! I'm talking about my reputation score, not my age! It's about time I give something back to the community. Another fun fact: it was on the 13th of January earlier this year when I created my Steem account. It has been exactly three months since I've entered this new world.

It took quite some time before I finally got the hang of how things go here. Steem, Steem power, SBD, voting power, vests, witnesses, the list goes on... It can be quite overwhelming for newcomers. Looking at the last three months, I wish I knew back then what I know now. There are so many cool tricks, features, and platforms up/in/around/next to Steemit that can make your Steem-life easier.

Absolute beginners Source: Pixelbay.com.

Although I only just started walking down the road to omniscience, I feel the need to share as much of the things I've learned. Hopefully, it will be useful to my fellow little planktons!

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Useful platforms

Busy.org

A favorite of mine is busy.org. It's a decentralized social network based on the Steem blockchain. What it boils down to is a website through which you can do most of what Steemit itself does, however, it has some additional features which are very useful, such as:

• bookmark posts
• save drafts of posts
• notifications on activity regarding your Steem account
• see your current vote value and the vote value of the votes you received for posts
• in m opinion, just a bit nicer user-interface compared to Steemit.com

Another great feature is that you can receive a free upvote from @busy.org when you write your post on busy.org and add busy as a tag to your post. There are of course some constraints to actually receiving the vote, but it is not too hard. More information on receiving the upvote from @busy.org can be found here

Smartsteem.com

I've only discovered this platform a few days ago and I'm far from being an expert on what it can do. However, the main idea is that you can sell/buy or bid for votes and you can delegate some of your Steem power in return for some of the profit made with the sold votes / delegated Steem power. There are some additional features and the different options you can use for selling voter or delegating is quite nice. There is also a rating system which is assigned to users based on the quality of their posts. When selling votes you can set the minimum required rating for which your votes are used. This is another incentive for people to write good posts.

Screenshot of the smartsteem website.

Myself I've started a few days ago with selling some of my votes to see how it works. And yep, I already made a small amount of SBD in return.

If you would like to sign up for Smartsteem you can use my referral link below. It will get me a small share (0.5%) of the votes you sell (which will be deducted from the share taken by smartsteem not your share!).

Referral link: https://smartsteem.com?r=michelmake

Using the above link would be really nice :)

Steemvoter.com

This is a useful tool if you would like to regularly vote on someone's posts, but don't want to sit and wait behind your computer all day for the person to actually post something. You can sign up through their website and set up to three automatic voting rules for free.

Screenshot of the steemvoter logo.

The only reason for me to use it, is for automatic voting on @steembasicincome. Why that is, I will explain in a little bit below.

Steemify mobile app

Steemify, which is available for iOS is an app that you can use to get notifications when someone writes a comment or votes on your posts. You can also set it to send you notifications if someone who you are following is posting something. I really like this app to keep track of what's going on on Steem when i'm AFK.

You can download it in the app store or on blockbrothers.io.

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Monitoring your account

Here's a short list of tools you can use to monitor your accounts, payouts and other useful metrics (typically also usable on other people's accounts).

Steemworld.org

Far out my favorite! It has most of what you need to analyze how your account is developing. You can check all the activity on you account:

• voting power
• upcoming payouts
• in/out coming votes/transaction/posts/comments
• you can simulate your voting power for an arbitrary amount of Steem power.
• you can check any other profile other than your own
• there is an indicator that tells you when you hit 100% voting power again.

Here are some screenshots:

The great thing is that you can even check out these metrics from other accounts (you can learn a lot from this to improve your own growth!). You can check it out here: www.steemworld.org.

Steem.Supply

Yet another website that allows you to check the performance of your posts. It has a neat graph that shows you the current SBD to Steem rate:

Appart from this graph it also has more in-depth metrics that come with nice graphics. You can check it out at the following link: steem.supply.

Steemstats

One of the first websites with account metrics for the Steemit blockchain I've got to know is steemstats.com.

Screenshot of steemstats.com

It has most of the features the other sites above have, however, I like it because it has quite a detailed overview per vote or post. You can check it out and you'll see.

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Generating that extra bit of income.

This is, in my opinion, one of the most useful things for fellow planktons to gain momentum. Here are some nicen ways of receiving some extra exposure and generate a bit more revenue from your posts.

Steem Basic Income

It is very likely you've come across this idea while on Steem. It is a social experiment on Steem, which provides some sort of basic income for people signed up. What it comes down to is that you buy a share of @steembasicincome which pays you in votes later on when you write posts. To buy a share you pay 1 Steem to @steembasicincome and you'll nominate one additional person that will also receive a share. This is nice because you can help out some of you Steem-buddies while getting a basic income :) A full detailed description can be found in this article.

You can further increase your share by upvoting the posts by @steembasicincome. If you do this for all their posts you double your number of shares. This is exactly why I use steemvoter.com which I described above.

Steemcleaners

Another great way of boosting your revenue while at the same time improving the community is reporting abuse to the Steemcleaners team. You can find their website at steemcleaners.org.

The Steemcleaners initiative has a bot called @cheetah which tries to detect all kinds of abuse on Steem such as:

• post spam
• tag spam
• identity theft
• plagiarism

The good thing though, is that you can help @steemcleaners by reporting abuse. I first heard about this through an article by @sv1rby, which is about his experiences with reporting abuse.

Since then, I've been reporting regularly (almost every day for a few minutes I scan some posts for plagiarism). And it has paid out quite ok for the amount of time put in.

Be aware that the delay between reporting and payout sometimes can be quite long, so be patient when reporting :)

Discord Channels

A lot of social activity around Steem happens in the chats. Most groups use Discord to organize themselves. A few which I've joined have mechanisms to get extra exposure for your posts and even daily upvotes.

Two of which I signed up for are Steem Repo and Peace Abundance Liberty (PAL). Both have an upvote bot that will allow you to get upvotes every 24 or 48 hours. Steem-Repo even has a bingo game on their discord channel that could get you some extra SBD when you win! You can get more info on both channels by just signing up for them.

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And probably the most useful!

Although the list above contains quite a number of useful tricks and tools, it is far from complete. There are many other things that can help boost your reputation and Steem power levels.

The most important to me though is putting time and effort into writing proper posts and investing time in interacting with followers, comment on articles you like and reply to the comments of your readers. I try every day to get to know people and build relationships through the platform. In the long run, this is what really pays off I think.

Also, simply by following what other Steemians are writing about, I've learned a lot. People such as @brittandjosie, @helenmunch, @riverflows, @susanne, @xwalkran amongst others provided me with many entertaining posts and interesting conversations. Without the support of people like this, I would have probably lost interest in the platform weeks ago. They are also the reason why I have a reputation score of 50 after my three months on Steemit. Thank you, guys!

With that, I would like to conclude my record-lengthy post! If you made it all the way down here, thank you! It's been fun so far!

If you have any questions, feel free to write me some nice comments!

Disclaimer:

I am not affiliated with any of the websites or platforms provided in this post, nor anyone who is profiting from the sale of anything related to them. The only reason for writing this post is to share knowledge that might be useful and interesting to others. This information helped me personally and therefore I think it is worth sharing. The only profit I could take from this post apart from votes is by means of the signup referral link given for smartsteem.com.

Image sources:

All images were screenshots from the respective websites or Steem accounts