Yay! Another homesteader joins the masses on Steemit! Welcome, welcome, welcome! Here are some things to help as you get your feet wet:

1. Follow for Follow - Avoid it and ignore those who may tell you it's the way to succeed here. Posts like "Follow me and I'll follow you back" are frowned upon by quality users here.
2. Upvoting - To get the best curation reward for upvoting someone's post, make sure the post is older than 20 minutes. There is an internal timer built into Steemit to not payout curation rewards for early votes--this is to prevent bots (robot accounts) from getting rich just from voting posts.
3. Followers - Don't worry about growing the number of followers. Instead, work on growing the people behind the numbers. True followers are much more beneficial than people who just follow you blindly and never come back to your content or interact with you.
4. Interact with Others - As you interact, you'll not only gain curation rewards, but you'll also get your name out there as a real person and others will check out your blog and maybe follow you, too.

Good luck! Looking forward to seeing what you create on here.