How to get started and be successful at Steemit!

In response to @papa-pepper’s challenge to create how-to’s, my mind has been in a how-to place for the past few days. And seeing as I now have some followers that actually followed me onto the platform, I think it’s time that I try to distill all that I have learned.

I have made plenty of mistakes and done hundreds of google searches of questions I have had, which nearly always lead me to a steemit article, some fine steemian has posted an article explaining exactly what I wanted to know, often in great detail.

1. Read Steem articles and search for Steem articles to read

If you want to be ‘successful’, by any definition, on Steemit, it would help to review what successful people are writing about, how they are achieving their success and how they are interacting with their followers. If you want to write about something, search for people writing about the same or similar things.

_{Search, for example, for piano playing wizards. If you're into that sort of thing.}

You can use the steemit beta search, but I more frequently search on google directly, and have always been lead right back to the steemit platform. Search for your questions on google, search for tags inside the platform.

2. Use tags - Click on tags to see other articles with that tag

This is a fun feature that took me a while to find, if you click on the tag, you can see a list of other articles that use that tag, which can be sorted by trending, hot, newest and promoted; I mostly use new and trending, but occasionally I click on hot, I’m not sure the difference between algorithms for trending and hot but probably someone has written an article about it!

Tags are the way articles are organized on Steemit, please do your best to put relevant and accurate tags on your articles.

3. Be nice, these posts are forever and ever

I addressed the concept of the immutable blog in a previous post, but never forget it!

Everything you write here may very well last longer than you, this is your legacy; consider your legacy before posting anything questionable, private, secret or spammy.

4. Write Comments!

Here we are getting down to the gold nuggets – using the comments.

I know very successful minnows that haven’t posted an article yet, or have posted very few. How do they do it? They search for high-quality users to interact with, and then they interact with them through comments!

In my mind there are a few ‘levels’ of comments. A happy response can be something as simple as ‘Thank you’ or ‘Great post!’, these are easy to write and add value, although not much.

Many bot comments fall in this category, they are positive, but can never add much to the conversation.

A higher level of answer is the direct response. This type of comment answers a question or concern raised by the article. In order to leave a direct response, you must actually read the article. You can answer with personal experience or generalized knowledge, and may include links or images.

(To add images to comments, I open 'Submit a Story' in a new tab, upload the image with the 'selecting them' button, and then copy the output to the other tab where I want to post the comment.)

5. Curate comments!

You may have noticed that comments appear in a ‘trending’ order, which seems to mean that the comments are ranked in payout order, with the highest payouts at the top. This makes sense, if we upvote the most relevant and helpful comments, they should appear closer to the article.

Without a bar, we have to take into account our voting power, which slowly diminishes as we continue to vote. Vote first for constructive comments that deserve a reply. Congratulatory comments are great too, and even a friendly bot deserves to be above a spammer.

Here is a great article by @sustainablyyours that explains his learning journey behind comment curation.

6. Be safe and avoid and ignore spammers

What is spam? I occasionally post what I consider relevant links to my blog in the comments on related articles; some people consider this behavior spam.

I follow US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 definition, ‘I know it when I see it’.

As newer members, there isn’t a great way for us to downvote, since it uses up our voting power to cancel the other votes we usually prefer to save our power for up voting. If something is particularly heinous you can report to @steemcleaners or even @sherlockholmes if there is conspiracy involved! But the best practice I have found is leaving spammy comments behind by upvoting and curating the good comments.

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This concludes the basics! There are many other things to learn and discuss, perhaps I will one day write a part 2.

Thanks for reading, and please check out the @ecotrain for a great group of people trying to make the world a better place.