{blog} The 500SP Pitch - Building A Niche

When not writing about things that go beep boop, I'm sifting through the updates on my feed. While I've now got a lot of fine people from the electronic music community, I've got a little net that spreads a bit wider. This is when I stumbled upon this post from @suesa. In a nutshell, they are offering up 500 SteemPower as a two month delegation to help a user grow Steemit.

If you happened to stumble upon my post about 2018 aims, you may have noted that one of the main things I am aiming to do is grow my SteemPower in order to help build the electronic music niche. Steemit, as a platform, is in great need of niche building. It has some broad tags that are very popular - photography, music, writing, art, gaming - but, as such, they are incredibly high volume and high speed. Unless you're there, in the moment, you're going to need to be a $$$ to attract any visibility.

When I started here, not a million years ago at the end of November 2017, there was very little in terms of a cohesive electronic music community. The tag was pretty much empty. Through a lot of sifting, I stumbled upon some fire curators in the form of @edje, @heymattsokol and @mammasitta - who have been wonderful in helping me build my profile here. As time went on, I kept plugging away with the electronic music tag, populating it. I saw new users come in and made sure I provided engagement and some hefty $0.01 upvotes in those early days. As time passed, those upvotes crept up to $0.08 and the amount of people I was interactive with grew.

The mission to pass the big 500 SteemPower mark is ongoing, but it's much more challenging at the moment. SteemDollar almost hit a flat 1:1 rate against Steem last night. The surge in Steem means it is harder to earn it, thereby making it harder to get that SteemPower. Gone are the glory 5:1 days of December. The 500 mark is fairly significant here on SteemIt. Yeah, you're able to dish out upvotes for a higher value - $0.22 right now - but you're able to control it better. Rather than going in 100% on every interaction, you can spread it out on a wider audience. This is something I could sincerely have done with in the first week of January, as my little (^) button was getting a serious workout.

Outside of the electronic music support, I've been keeping an eye on the influx of new users via the @welcoming account, making sure I help bring in users that I have an affinity with. This isn't strictly a music thing - I've been happily chatting away to just about anyone I get on with!

Until SteemIt rolls out the community functionality - which I'm going to be all over - this sort continual push to fill out a niche in less generalised tags is going to be invaluable in bringing in and retaining users. New, Hot, Trending - these just won't cut it, and the search button is only vaguely useful. As we build over here, the network will grow and we will become a little SteemTeem.

Oh, and I'm going to be writing a critical piece on how blockchain will provide a new avenue for content creators over at Inverted Audio. So there is some reach for the various technologies to some of the key audiences it will want to reach.

So there we go. That's my pitch.