Hello and welcome! Being able to write well is one of the keys to success here on Steemit. The other is having expertise in an area others have interest in learning more about. You certainly write well. Based on the tidbits of your history you've shared above, I suspect you have plenty to write about as well.

What are you life long objectives? What are your passions? What are your areas of expertise?

I regularly go through introduceyourself posts looking for promising new accounts. Yours is. You'll do very well here simply because you appear to have a similar goal to me. I'm here to write about my passions. In fact the ultimate goal is to write a book about residential security. My goal is not to make lots of money either. The money is just a bonus.

My main objective in life is to protect and further individual liberty. I became a PI to help people. That's the same reason why I'm focusing on residential physical security and not corporate too. Corporate pays ten times as much, but that's not my passion. You can see that in the earlier posts I made if you care to look through them.

You "flow" when you write like I do. Michael Jordan and other pros describe it as "being in the zone." I prefer the term "flow" because I believe we are all creators. When we write, we are creating. Creation flows from us. Do you know how I know you experience the same?

In my final year at varsity, while studying my Honours degree, I became an Entertainment Journalist at the university’s student newspaper. This is where my enjoyment in writing really took off; I had always wanted to try my hand a writing yet always felt I didn’t have the talent for it.

You wrote "a" but meant "at" before the word "writing."

After over a year of seeing my work being published, I know that I do in fact have the capability to be a good writer. By no means to I consider myself an expert, but I now have the confidence to put my writing out into the public space and feel proud of what I have created.

You wrote "to" but meant "do" before the words "I consider."

Your writing is flowing from you, and you miss those mistakes. That's not a negative critique. I do the exact same thing. Heck, I probably have done it in this long reply. That is a sign of a writer who has creation flowing from them. To me it is almost as if creation takes over, and it is flowing through me. It's like auto pilot for a plane. Sure, you're in it traveling through the sky, but you don't even have to think about what's happening. The plane just flies.

The best writers have words simply flow from them. They have an idea in mind, and they get in the zone. The idea is then easily created. If I have a drink of wine or mead before I write, I tend to experience the "flow" phenomena even more. Do you know what I'm talking about? I strongly suspect you will.

Please keep at your craft. You're a natural. Here's the regular new user information I share to help people become pro Steemians. Definitely consider the chat options with steemit.chat and discord, and I highly recommend setting up the GINAbot to better engage people in topics you're interested in by getting notified of key words the bot finds across Steemit.

Webpages

There are a ton of other webpages to help you with Steemit. Here are some of the best for beginners:

https://steemian.info/signup-faq (This site is by @drakos and has a ton of good information for new users to help them get started.)

https://steemd.com/ (This site is used to keep track of your voting power and other stats. You do not want to run out of voting power, and you only get so much per day. I keep my voting power around 80% for example.)

https://steem.makerwannabe.com/ (This site will tell you who follows you, who unfollows you, and who mutes you. It is great for meeting new people too. I regularly check it to see who has followed me to see if I should follow them back.)

https://steemit.chat/ (This site is the official chat webpage for Steemit. There are Discord channels too, but I usually stick to the official site. Come in to network and meet new friends. You can directly message people there too, so it makes it easier to communicate with your closest friends.)

http://steemtools.com/ (This site is a comprehensive list of valuable tools.)

Bots

There are a lot of bots on Steemit. Some are useful and good, and others are not. If you see a cookie cutter reply, especially to your intro post, it is almost certainly a bot. Check the account's reputation. If it is low, I would recommend just ignoring them. Everything is public on Steemit, so you can go look at an account's comments and replies. Are they all the same? It's a bot.

There's one good bot worth mentioning for new users. It is called GINAbot, and you can use it to keep track of things the makerwannabe site above cannot easily do. For example, GINAbot will tell you when a key phrase is used, when you or someone else is mentioned by account name, or even if someone deletes a comment. The bot is extremely powerful and free. Simply add the following Discord server:

https://discord.gg/x9Empcm

When you connect to it, it will ask you to register and verify your account with a .0001 SBD or STEEM transfer. Then you will get a direct message from the bot with a private link to your configuration page. Go there to setup your options. The entire process takes 5 minutes, and it will be up and running. You can tweak the settings as you go too. I highly recommend people use it for networking purposes.

I have mine set to look for phrases like "residential security" and "private investigator" as two examples. Then I never miss out on content related to those, and it makes going there to engage in those conversations much easier. Without GINAbot, I would never have had the opportunity either! Check it out, and ask if you have any questions.

Sourcing and Adding Photos

Adding photos to your account as a new Steemian may be confusing at first too. The easiest way it to click to "Submit a Story." Once in there, use the built in Steemit tool to upload an image from your computer. Below the posting window, you will see "Insert images by dragging & dropping, pasting from the clipboard, or by selecting them." Click on the blue text. Once the image is uploaded, you can copy and paste the link into your account settings.

Here's a link to a Google Document I made to help with the coding:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NlAoGnP8q7ZAxGsEnvza-qotUGkoaae4SwXdubAhi2g/edit?usp=sharing

Graphics, Badges, Signature Blocks, and Banners

There are many skilled and talented graphic artists on Steemit. One of them is a close friend, @grow-pro. He designed my signature gif, badges, divider lines, business cards, and more. You can check out his work further on your own. If you are looking for a graphic artist to help improve your posting images and formatting, he offers low cost services here on Steemit. Look him up!

Account Verification

Verifying your identity is very important because it will get you more support and people will trust you more. The best way to verify is to link back to your Steemit account by using another public social media account.

For example, I share my Steemit posts on my @finnianGC Twitter account. Another way would be to add your Steemit information to your Facebook account. Some people will even post a video of themselves writing out their account information since that cannot be Photoshopped.

The more famous a person is and the more valuable their content is, the more important it is that they verify.

Security

Do not use your owner key to log into Steemit.com to post. Use your private posting key instead. Keep your owner key offline as much as possible, and only use it when you must.

Per the advice given by Arcanage, you should only use your owner key to:

1. Recover your account.
2. Change the other keys.
3. Give a present to your children a few minutes before dying.

There have been some scams in the past. If you click a link to a site that prompts you to log into it, be extra careful. Double and triple check the address to make sure it is really steemit.com. A recent scam was using "lsteemit" as the domain name, and people were entering their owner keys to log into it. That allowed the scammers to take those user's accounts, empty the money from them, and then ruin their reputation by using the newly hacked accounts to further the scam.

If you find or suspect a scam, please report it in the #steemitabuse channel on steemit.chat.

Don't Lose Your Content

Make sure you are copying and pasting your post content often as you write it, and put the data into another document to avoid losing it. I'll copy and paste my content into a Google document as just one example. Some people use Markup editors to do the same.

Definitely keep a backup copy right before you post it too, for some people have come back the next day to see half or the entire post missing even though the day before it displayed correctly. Make sure you copy and backup your long replies as well, for they can vanish immediately after clicking to post them.

Again, welcome! If you have any questions about getting started, look me up on the chat site or reply to this post.