New Beginnings

Step into a new world ... Blogging. For me all of this is new. I was never into social media, I started here on SteemIt because of a recommendation by someone on Poloniex. I took a look around, and started writing. Granted I am by no means a great writer, I feel in my short time here I have improved. I have seen both times of excitement, where a post starts to gain lots of votes. And times of discouragement, where there was almost no votes at all. Being that I am optimistic, and I see that hard work can pay off, I have keep my motivation up and started pressing on, making every effort I could to help encourage others to stick it out in the down times.

There have been several people here who have been around longer than I have that continually have given me encouragement. It is because of the efforts of people like @papa-pepper, @etcmike, @barrydutton, and others that keep me focused and working to get better at writing.

Some days I just feel like I did my best, and I am frustrated that my post did not work out as well as I would have hoped. During these times it is hard to see that it took these other people time to build up followers. Today @dantheman wrote an article

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https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/building-long-term-value-from-your-blog

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Dan is talking about the bigger picture, what most of us do not realize is that "How long would it take you to create a blog and actually make money on it?" We see this system, SteemIt is already in place paying us. We take for granted the hard work of the users who have actually taken the time to build up a following. Some of us, myself included thought, SteemIt a great place I can make easy money. Forgetting the fact that to really get there it would actually take time. SteemIt is not a get rich quick scheme.

We forget all the hard work @papa-pepper puts into actually creating his unique style, or even how long it took him to get a group of followers. Sure some of those closer to the beginning of SteemIt may have had a little bit easier of a time getting noticed, but even they had to put in their time. Blogging takes time, and hard work, here on SteemIt when we write our blogs we can set them up for 100% power up, basically I will wait for my reward another day, which at the moment does require 13 weeks to power down. The other payout option is 50% power up saying I spent my time, and want quick money.

It’s not a get rich quick ordeal, but if you do it right, you could make enough to support your family and more.

Many bloggers are forced to use ads, be it CPC/CPM, cost per click or cost per 1,000 impressions. These two types of ads do not pay very much. What many of us do not realize is the normal progression of a business model. How many years does it take for a start up to really start making money. Most users are in the tail according to the white paper review done by @stellabele, that means right now we are in that "Valley of Death!"

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https://steemit.com/steem/@stellabelle/steem-whitepaper-for-dummies-reward-distribution

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Image used from Dan's Blog.

There are two things we are forgetting, first is how much of your time would it have taken to start your own blog, advertise it, gain followers, before it would ever start making a profit. According to Dan's article it took an accomplished blogger with more than 40 hours a week worth of work 7 months to barely start making $4.12/day. From the little I been looking around at other users accounts there are not very many users here on SteemIt who have been around for 7 months, and yet they are simply just giving up.

Here on SteemIt we have a major advantage to that of an average blogger, we have a platform where several people are already on, so the painstaking task of advertising is a large step we can avoid. There are already others on SteemIt who are interested in most topics, so the readers are here.

Thinking about this @sstefan has a great point.

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https://steemit.com/life/@sstefan/is-the-glass-half-full-or-half-empty

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Is The glass here half full, readers, blog structure etc. Or is it half empty, lower or no rewards to users at the bottom. Should we be optimistic, or pessimistic about the work we are doing here. I would say the third option, the glass is always full, in part is water, the other part is air.

According to Problogger.net one blogger said

I did not make any money from my first blogs for almost 18 months

Remember it takes time, smartblogger.com said

It took me about five years to earn my first dollar.

So, even with the discouraging reward payouts for those of us minnows we need to remember all the things we are not having to do here. We are not selling ad space, we are not actively going out and promoting our content. Most of this has already been done, all we really need to focus on the way SteemIt is set up is working on creating quality content. As we add quality content people are going to start joining SteemIt as the pages start making it on the SEO aspect, search engines will find them in time, and we will start seeing our followers grow.

Look at it this way, was it worth all the time and effort @papa-pepper, @sweetsssj or @sirwinchester have devoted to making great quality posts. Both @papa-pepper and @sirwinchester have been on SteemIt since July, where as @sweetsssj started in August. Just looking at the numbers they have spent a lot of time creating posts, and working up to the point they are. Today Steem is around $0.15 per Steem, I'm not sure if any of these 3 Steemians where around when Steem was at it's all time high of $4.00 per Steem, but just do the math, we add our content and value here, if Steem does top out at $4 per Steem, "What would your new net-worth be?"

Conclusion

We are all working together, we all have a part of where this train will go. It is up to us, if we want to see this platform succeed we can do our best at adding great quality content.

Thank you for reading I hope you liked this post. Don't forget to upvote, follow and resteem! I wrote this as part of the 30 day writing challenge.

Image Source 1, 2, 3, 4

Source 1, 2, 3

Thanks to SteemVerify.com and @elyaque

Thanks to @papa-pepper for the last gif.