Hey, nice to meet you here. One thing you will find is that the steemit community is pretty awesome. It is growing and we cannot fight the human condition, so we are getting some trolls and "follow me and I'll follow you" people...but in general if you browse around in site, find posts you really like and leave real comments, you will get a following pretty quickly. You seem like a real kindof guy, so I bet you do well here :)
You can find alot of help in @minnowsupport too. They have a huge membership and a great discord channel. https://discord.gg/gsGW3p
Meanwhile, pop onto my posts if you have questions. You can just ask, I don't mind if it is off topic...