#needleworkmonday #minnowuprising and #hardfork20 | Growing the needleworkmonday community

A beautiful image from pixabay.com - very fitting for #needleworkmonday!

Well, that was the hard fork. Good to be back :)
This is one of two posts I'll be making today for the #needleworkmonday community. This one is about growing your account through #minnowuprising. You can skip to the end if you are just interested in the @treeplanter voting circle.

Introduction

Back in July, I kept a small survey of the growth of 22 #needleworkmonday accounts as part of the #minnowuprising campaign.

#minnowuprising was @taskmaster4450's initiative to overwhelm Steemit with plankton and minnow posts, to grow our accounts and get a bigger piece of the Steemit pie.

This means if you are a plankton (less than 500 Steem Power) or a minnow (less than 5,000 Steem Power), the goal is to post consistently and to use your vote power to upvote fellow baby fish. You get ten 100% upvotes a day.

@taskmaster4450 suggests that now might be a good time to have another go at this, especially as the number of accounts posting has dropped. The reward pool remains the same each day, so with less people posting, if you do post you stand to receive a greater proportion of the reward pool.

This sounds like a good idea to me :)

I started by having a quick check of where our 22 accounts are now. At the end of July, the accounts held 10,136 Steem Power (SP) between them. Yesterday, they held 11,490 SP - an increase of 1,354 SP. That's a growth rate of 13%! Looking good :)

The accounts breakdown looks like this:

Less than 20SP - 7 accounts
More than 20SP less than 80SP - 5 accounts
More than 80SP less than 500SP - 7 accounts
More than 500SP - 3 accounts

I've taken 80SP as a threshold because, under Resource Credits which were introduced in Hard Fork 20, this seems to be the minimum an account needs to operate easily, so it's pretty important to get our smaller accounts up to this threshold, if we can.

Here's some ideas about how to do that:

1. Post Consistently

This was the lesson from @mrscwin in her post at the end of the last #minnowuprising. True to his name, @taskmaster4450 proposed posting 3 or 4 times a day for maximum benefit. Here in the #needleworkmonday community we decided that wasn't really our style - many people didn't have time to post more than two or three times a week. Others were concerned about irritating and losing our regular supporters by flooding their feed with posts.

The important thing is to decide what's right for you and to try and stick to that.

Last month, I set myself a target to post everyday. I would do one or two regular posts (like this one) a week, and for the remainder of the week, I would take advantage of two DApps (Decentralised Applications):

Actifit (@actifit)

Actifit records your steps through the day and rewards you with an upvote and AFIT tokens. Votes vary from the lowest level 5,000 steps to the maximum 10,000 and above steps a day. You can find out more at the website above.

It takes about five minutes to post your Actifit report card at the end of the day. I then go and edit my post to add a picture and a little description. My best time for this is 7 minutes. So, in less than 15 minutes, I have a post up and ready for upvotes and comments.

This is the example that I like to use. @actifit upvotes anyone who reaches the minimum level of movements in a day using their application. The post on STEEM is the verification that the activity was completed. Yesterday's upvote from them, for full completion, was .31. This means that over 200 accounts, most of them smaller, received this upvote. What a difference from the .01 and .02 many newer posts get.

Over the course of a month, this is about 9 STEEM. Naturally, one is not going to get rich off that yet, if you are an account that has 50 SP, this is a nice one month increase. And this is simply for one post a day.
@taskmaster4450: Whales are losing their power

There are some considerations with Actifit: you can read about them in this post from @slobberchops.

DLike @dlike

DLike is an DApp where you share links that you like with the community. You add the url, a picture and description are (usually) pulled from the website, and you can edit and add your own comments before publishing. Dlike also upvotes your post and awards you with dlike tokens. It has a curation trail which usually adds another 0.06 to my posts. My last DLike post took less than 5 minutes to publish.

DLike is a work in progress and improvements are being added all the time. I'm expecting boards and bookmarks very soon - I think these will be especially interesting to the #needleworkmonday community. Here's a review of dlike from @nathen007. DLike has the same considerations as Actifit - no one wants their feed flooded with dozens of links and not much else, so use wisely :).

2. Vote Wisely

Anyone with less than 500SP has 10 100% votes per day. These look like 0.00 when you use them, but they do have a miniscule value. The DLike curation trail I mentioned above has about 29 voters all voting at, apparently, 0.00, but the 29 together add about 0.06 to a post.

It is really important to cluster your votes in this way because any single vote worth less than 0.03 on a post disappears and no one benefits. So, if you want to reward someone, priotise voting on posts rather than comments. And remember that your vote, however tiny, is worth something, so make sure you use your ten votes a day.

However much SP any one of us has, we really want to get maximum benefit from it when we are voting. Here's @slobberchops again with some more ideas in Minnows and Planktons: Are you utilizing your comment voting efficiently.

In the last #minnowuprising, I gave one 100% vote every day to a small number of people who post under the #needleworkmonday tag. This time round, I will give one smaller autovote per day, every day throughout October, to everyone who posts under the #needleworkmonday tag, meeting the posting guidelines, during that month. I reserve the right to remove autovotes at my discretion.

Finally, don't forget to vote after fifteen minutes otherwise your vote is lost.
What can you do to grow the #needleworkmonday community with your votes during October?

3. Finally, the @treeplanter voting circle :)

First of all, thanks to @phoenixwren for coming up with this brilliant idea way back in the year. We had a little discussion about doing this, because it is really easy to get in a muddle! So please READ THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY OTHERWISE @TREEPLANTER IS LIKELY TO JUST BENEFIT FROM SOME ADDITIONAL DONATIONS AND WE WILL ALL JUST BE VIRTUOUS BUT POORER.

Currently, @treeplanter offers an additional 20% vote for your own posts - if you transfer .100 SBD to @treeplanter, you will get a 0.12 vote on your post. However, @treeplanter is currently offering an additional 100% vote if you vote for someone else - if you transfer 0.100 SBD, your beneficiary will receive a 0.20 vote on their post.

@treeplanter

If you would like to take part in this week's @treeplanter voting circle you must:

• post today under the #needleworkmonday tag according to the guidelines in the introduction post (I'm going to make an exception for the @needleworkmonday curation post which may be published later in the week).
• have 0.100 SBD in your account.
• post a comment below saying you would like to take part and giving the url for your eligible #needleworkmonday post.

There is often a queue for @treeplanter votes, so add your comment as soon as you can, the cut off time will be (edited) 8am London Time on Wednesday 3 October 2018 (except for @needleworkmonday).

I will vote for the first eligible post, and then I will leave a reply to each comment telling them which post to vote for until the last eligible commenter, who will vote for my post. Please don't vote until I tell you who to vote for.

Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy!