Why I powered up, and why you should too.

If you’re an active contributor and you also own STEEM, powering up is simply a no-brainer! Let me tell you why I think so.

The Main Reason

As an investor in STEEM, and an active blogger and contributor, it just makes no sense at all not to power up. First and foremost, as an active contributor, powering up is the best way to get the most out of your overall contribution towards the continued success of your investment. Obviously posting quality content is extremely important to begin with, but with Steem Power your curation also works towards the goal of ensuring that Steemit is a trusted source of quality content. Quality content is what will drive Steemit’s success, and while this responsibility begins with authors, it’s the audience who ultimately bears the brunt of that responsibility, especially if your platform gives you a financial mechanism for curating. When you power up, you start promoting quality content using real monetary incentives. If you self upvote your own quality work (articles, comments, and the like), you’ll also earn money yourself. That having been said, you’ll have to work, no doubt about it, but if you’re an investor in STEEM, and an active blogger and contributor as well, you really have no excuse for not doing your most in making Steemit a success.

My Strategy

My strategy is simple since it’s dictated by common sense: post on things I know and curate on the same. I’m a language teacher with degree in Legal Studies who also has broad experience in both IT and investing. The truth of the matter is that my areas of so called expertise are limited (and relative as well). They define exactly where I plan to contribute, and, as would logically be expected, I’m not going to post or curate on something I don’t know or understand. That having been said, I’m also a photography hobbyist, book lover, film buff, etc., etc., so I might make an occasional comment outside of my areas of expertise.

I also have limitations within my areas of expertise as well. I was mainly into hardware, operating systems, and sys admin, but I also designed, created and maintained websites and their servers so I know a little html, javascript and php, etc. With the advent of crypto I learnt enough about C+ to be able to read and understand code, thanks to the comments. 😅 And what does all that mean? It means that I know enough to be dangerous, and that means being cautious with curation efforts where my knowledge is limited. I’ve been in crypto since 2013 and I’m quite knowledgeable on the subject, but caution is still the word here with upvotes and comments. It’s not like we can look at the URL to get an idea on the credibility and accuracy of something . . . even though we do have the rep rating. 😉

Even where my experience and knowledge has a stronger foundation, like in the world of business, economics, finance and investing where nothing is ever black and white, I still think healthy humility is an imperative.

In short, my strategy, and the strategy I recommend to everyone, is to engage in a healthy give and take of ideas, opinions and knowledge with others in the areas where you’re an “expert”. If your area of expertise is food, or travel, or health, or science, or politics, or whatever, then, after steeming up, that is where you should focus your curation efforts. That is how you, how I, how we all, working together, can each make our most effective individual contributions towards making Steemit the high quality content provider we dream it to be.

It’s Tough Work, and You Deserve to Reward Yourself

Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t deserve to upvote yourself – if you’ve ever worked on quality curation and/or quality content posting, you know you’re worth every cent of your self upvoting! Truth is we’re really worth much more since, for the majority of us, what we end up seeing in terms of “ROI” on our hard work is well below the minimum wage, so please, upvote yourself.

I certainly will be upvoting myself, but I will limit it to half of my upvoting – the other half will go to original quality content and/or meaningful comments and material contributed by other Steemians. A 50/50 split at 100% power is my rough target, unless I post something fairly insignificant like a smilie, in which case I won’t upvote myself, or in the case where someone else has given a good faith effort but didn’t quite perform up to standard, a 20-50% upvote might be appropriate.

As I’ve already said, what the majority of us make doing this is next to nothing, and as such, we obviously don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to the task. In my case, I’m going to commit 7 hours a week to the effort – I need to find and/or create (because my half has to be quality content as well) 10-12 upvotes worth of quality content in an average of 1 hour a day, and that’s not easy to do if you give a good 30 minutes to /created/your_area_of_expertise looking for new stuff before you move on to the overlooked in /hot/your_area_of_expertise after first giving a quick look at your feed to see if there’s some overlooked quality content that’s been missed . . .

Networking with other Steemians working towards similar ends in shared areas of expertise would likely help to make curation more efficient. One model might be an informal group of 30-40 or so, each publishing once a week which would give each contributor a good 5-6 100% upvotes a day (or 10-12 50% upvotes, whatever you most prefer, time allowing, but you get my idea, right?).

It’s pretty easy to just go around giving out random upvotes; it’s quite a different story if you’re looking to really reward quality content. It’s been said that blogging is the new mining. Unlike mining, with blogging you don’t need to spend big bucks on hardware, or pay expensive electricity bills. But you don’t get to sit on your butt either. No, with this you must work! That’s the price for not having huge electric bills and huge capital investment. 😎

The Second Reason for Powering Up

This really brings us back to the main reason itself, but it’s slightly independent as it is more immediate and guaranteed in terms of return on investment: as mentioned, you can, and should, upvote your own posts and comments, and if you upvote 10-12 times a day, half to other contributors you deem to have posted quality content, and the other half to yourself for having found and commented on that quality content, you’ll earn an additional 10% per annum, more or less, on your investment. When you combine that 10% to the roughly 9.5% your SP earns every year, you’ve got an almost 20% yearly gain just for starters, leaving aside longer term price appreciation of STEEM brought about by your community motivated quality content.

Conclusion

By powering up AND actively posting and/or curating quality content we not only increase our individual annual ROI to roughly 20%, but we also do everything in our power to make Steemit the high quality content provider we want it to be, which is, beyond any shadow of doubt, the best way we can contribute to making our collective investment in STEEM the most profitable it can be.

Sound like good enough reasons to power up?

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@cryptographic