Ten days ago, while Tommas was fooling around on YouTube and looking for ways to make money online, he came across a video that the enthusiastic YouTuber was saying that he can earn cryptocurrencies just by writing posts. He thought of another cryptocurrency scam, like the mining company that disappeared overnight, and the faucets, that while he was very thirsty they were giving him water with the dropper, and he never withdrew his earnings. Out of curiosity, he visits the site that the YouTuber was talking about, and he sees some astronomical amounts of dollars per post. A sly smile is etched on his face, and he immediately thinks "where do I sign up?".

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Two days later he receives a mail from steemit and finally, he can use the site. He signs in and immediately he is looking how to post. After about an hour, having searched around the site for how to do it, he manages to publish his first post, something cute kittens he found on the internet with the title "Some cats". He is excited but also very anxious, waiting for the steemit users to vote for his post and to see at least $20 in his payouts.
Unfortunately, 8 hours have passed and no one has voted for Thomas's post, he is very disappointed and he decides to explore the site and see what other users do and manage to earn even three-digit amounts just by one post. He does a quick search but all the posts are very long, and written in detail and he is bored to read so many texts.
Fortunately, a notification gave him the answer for his next move. It was a comment from a kind lady who welcomed him and wrote that she loved his photo. Furthermore, she wrote that he has to make an introduction post, to introduce himself to the community and that he has many possibilities to earn votes from whales. Also, she sent him some links with instructions for newcomers and the tag of the introductions posts. Even that he didn't know what whales are and how important their vote is, he clicked the tag and show many introduction posts and some of them had even 50 or 100 dollar payout.
Most of the introduction posts he saw before, were very long with several photos and many paragraphs. He thought that he has to make a similar post, so he started to write his introduction and 4 hours later he finished and published his intro post. Once again he is excited but this time he is sure that he will earn something. Indeed 5 minutes later he sees 2 votes and 0.15$ payouts. He thought oh my god it is working and went directly to sleep because he was slaphappy after the long use of the screen.

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The next morning he wakes up with a good feeling, and his first move was to turn his laptop on and then go wash his face. Then he makes coffee and sits in front of the laptop to see how many users have voted for his post. He enters his profile on steemit and surprisingly he sees that his post has 18 votes, 7 comments but only 0.45 payment. He immediately feels a strange negative feeling and is frustrated, thinking "why do other users make money and I do not?" Then he switches the television on, and watches a silly show to forget about steemit for a while.
In the afternoon he enters steemit again and to his greater surprise, his payouts are now $16.42. A huge smile forms on his face and again he feels a strange feeling, but very positive this time. He thinks "But how did this happen since I have only one extra vote?" but he does not care, the result is what matters. In seven days he will be paid $16 which objectively is not a lot of money if you consider that he spoiled his eyes for so long in front of the screen but next time he will make more.
He starts reading the comments below his post, and is very happy to be welcomed and invited to various communities to help him get started. He chose one photography community and started to post daily. Every morning, with his morning coffee, he was looking for what he would post that day, and read other users' posts to adapt more easily and find strategies to make more money. During the day he was capturing pictures for his post and in the evening he was writing his posts and publishing them.

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The administrators of the community were supporting him daily by commenting on his posts and answer all of his questions. Sometimes they are voting for his posts but not always. His rewards per post were ranging from 10 cents to $ 1 and one time he earned $ 6 from a single post.
The seventh day came and Tommas impatiently was waiting for his first payout. When this blessed time came, one more time he gets disappointed again. He earned $8 instead of $16 and half of them were locked and he couldn't take them the certain moment. He thought that steemit is one more crypto scam and quickly tried to transfer his liquid payouts to an exchange, to see if he will receive them. To his great surprise 3 minutes later the coins had arrived at the exchange. It was the first time he could withdraw so soon. He used the sbd to buy a coin that he heard will rise up soon.
Although he did not like the fact that those who vote for him get half of his rewards, he continued to post daily in his favorite community, participating in competitions.
One month later he has exchanged all of his liquid rewards into other promising coins and he starts to power down his locked earnings because he wanted to invest them at a bitcoin doubler. He continues to post, but not daily anymore, also his rewards have not gone up at all, on the contrary, every time he posts, he earns fewer rewards, and now he is not in the mood to make a post.

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As time goes by, he has started to get bored of Steemit and posts very rarely, until he completely stops posting and forgets about it. The next months, he spends his time calmly going to work every day and in his free time, he watches TV or talks on the phone with his friends to kill the time. He is now convinced that you cannot earn online. "I just was wasting my time for very little money", he says when his friends asked him about steemit.
Time passed very quickly and seven months later Thomas reads a tweet that says that bitcoin has reached a new peak, this time after a five-month upward rally, the price of the king of cryptocurrencies reached $ 150,000. Unfortunately, six months ago he sold all of his cryptocurrencies because he wanted to get a new pair of jeans. It was his favorite brand and it was on 30% sale so he grabbed the opportunity. Now that the crypto that he sold for a pair of jeans worth buying 10 of them, he is shocked and he can΄t believe it.
Then he remembered that he has some steem coins in his wallet but he did not he remember how many they are exactly. He immediately checked the coinmarketcap site and when he saw the price of steem he froze up. The time he sold his last steem, its price was $ 0,35 and these days, 7 months later the price has skyrocketed to $ 11,2. It is unbelievable, he sold 100 steem for 35 dollars and 7 months later they worth more than $ 1000. He can΄t believe that he sold his coins for $35 which is an insignificant amount of money, and now they worth 30 times more!!!

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The next few days pass and he can not digest that he had a great opportunity to generate a good income from the internet and he let so much time be wasted watching TV and scrolling on the cell phone. Instead of dedicating 1 hour on Steemit daily he chose to waste his time on silly TV shows and from all views he earned nothing. Zero money, zero creativity, zero socialization and zero knowledge. So he lost a lot all this time.
He decides, to start over steemit again but this time he is determined to do it right. He visits steemit platform again after a long time and despite that many things have changed, he feels like he has never gone and started to explore around communities to find out how he will start again. After a lot of digging, he found a new community with many curators and he decided to post there daily and this time to truly engage with the other users of the community.
He worked hard for his posts and his payouts were good enough. Now his posts earn $ 10+ daily and he was very happy until the seventh day came, where his first post was paid. He earned less than half a steem power, and 2 liquid dollars. He froze up again and thinks he missed the train. Opportunities in life often arise, it is up to us whether to seize them or let them pass by us and greet us from afar in the future. When you support a project when it still has very few users you will make a lot more money in the long run. On the contrary, if you start supporting it when it becomes mainstream, it is much more difficult to stand out from the crowd and generally succeed. Once again Tommas got disappointed and quit Steemit.

How abou you? Will you be here for a long time or you are just a passer-by

I wrote this little story today because I see a lot of users wasting their valuable steem, selling them for ridiculous amounts of dollars at the exchanges without understanding that this project can give them back a lot more money just by holding the coin staked. Selling their steem for buying unnecessary things can not make any substantial difference in their life. Also, I have seen users with 70+ reputation score with 60 steem power. Why did they do that to themselves? They spend all their liquid rewards and power down all of their power. Let me remind you that 50% of the payouts are coming from curation. So why are you losing 50% of the payouts by powering down your earnings?

I have been here for a very short time but I have realized that there are two main categories of users here on steemit. Those who power down and those who power up. In the first category, people are frivolous and looking for quick opportunistic profit. Despite their grandiose dreams, they do not save money and spend all of their earnings immediately after they getting paid. They cant see the bigger picture and eventually they give up.

The second category of users has understood the dynamics of steemit and invest either their money or their time in the steem blockchain. They power up, and they do not look daily the price of steem, they see it as a long-term investment. Also, they post daily and they do not care how much their post earned, they know that some months or some years later, these rewards will worth a lot more money. They feel blessed that they can earn such a valuable asset so cheap before its price will skyrocket and they stake as much steem as they can. In addition to author rewards, they also earn curation rewards. It is a pity to take advantage of a platform like steemit and earn only 50% of what you could earn. These people take advantage of steemit 100%, they are dedicated to its revolutionary ecosystem and invest both their money and time on steemit and they will be very well rewarded in the upcoming years.

So In which category do you belong to the losers or the winners? You will make $ 100,200 and then you will disappear or you will see it as a business that can offer you a passive income in the future. If you belong to the second category I advise you to make a strategy on how to increase your steem power as quickly as possible. We are very lucky because at the moment the price of sbd is $ 7 so with one sbd we can buy about 10 sp so this means that we can grow our steem power even faster and of course, our daily earnings.
There are many ways to harness your power, you can earn a very good amount of steem daily just by curating qualitative content that you think that whales will appreciate. If you are a good curator you can earn from 15-30% from your stake yearly. Furthermore, if you don't have time to curate you can delegate your steem power to another curator and he will send you your profits daily. The choices to earn money on steemit are countless. and it is on you how you will take advantage of them. What is your steemit strategy? can't wait for your comments. :)