LEAVE STEEMIT NOW!!

If you have been told everything you need to know about Steemit, you have been onboarded for about a month or more, yet you think Steemit is a passing fad; if you think it will fail like all other internet based businesses you have put your money into in the past; if you are still questioning every aspect of the blockchain technology, not because you seek knowledge but because you seek to prove that it is indeed a scam; if you think Steemit is a get rich quick scheme and you are annoyed that you are not getting the riches as quickly as you had thought; if you have an offline job that pays you more than Steemit, that consumes your time more than Steemit, that you need to focus on but can’t because you are looking for a passive income and you think Steemit is the place to get the passive income; please leave the platform fast. Steemit is not for everyone.

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I am serious. Steemit is not for everyone. If you are a superb writer; won so many awards offline, you have been published in numerous journals and literary blogs, you have published books that sold millions of copies, and you do not have a single friend on Steemit after a month, please leave. Steemit is not for you. This also applies to musicians, artists, actors, talk show hosts, etc. As long as you have not been able to make one or two friends on steemit, please do not worry yourself, just log out and don’t come back.

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You may be like the above advice is not promoting the Steemit platform; this is not helping the Steemit community and all that. Well the thing is, for those people mentioned above, I am simply trying to help them take the easiest path, the path that will lead them back to sanity, back to comfort.

So many persons are on Steemit who do not know what to do or who are afraid of rejection; no upvotes, no comments, no views. If you look at certain blogs on the platform, all you see is resteems. This is not Facebook where you can share stuff from other people’s walls for the rest of your life and it won’t matter. This is Steemit!

What is your contribution to the community? What is your legacy? What are you leaving on the blockchain for posterity? Resteems? Come on! You are not Santa! You cannot keep resteeming other blogs when you have little or no followers and even the few you have are silent; they followed you then they forgot you immediately. Who are you resteeming the posts to?

Build your blog. Create content. Write a play, an article on anything in the whole wide world, write a short story, take pictures, sing us a song; Steemit is a voracious animal. It will consume your content and won’t be satisfied.

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The question is; if Steemit was your personally created blog like Blogger or WordPress, will you be posting other bloggers posts every day? Will you sit on your hands and pray for Google adsense to approve your application for advertisements? Come on! You will hustle stories and content for that blog and make it work. This is despite the fact that there are no guarantees of a payday. Now on Steemit, you are guaranteed 75% of your efforts from the get go, yet you mutter and scratch, murmur and throw side glances. Please go home!

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On this platform, you have the opportunity to become anything you want to be. I have never done spoken word poetry before but I went ahead and did it and those whose opinions I value said that I did a good one and I should keep at it. If I had scrapped the idea, I won’t get such positive feedback and support. Did I get much money out of it? Not yet but the encouragement has added something to me that was not there before. I can dare to recite my poems now because I can. You too can dare to become who you are not, right here on Steemit.

Do you have dreams of being a musician but you are afraid of the reception your song will get? Drop it on @dsound and surprise yourself. Do you have an idea for a comedy skit but not enough money to do it the traditional way? Do it with your buddies with a small camcorder and drop it on @dtube and you will surprise yourself. And yes, you will get paid for it.

So what are you waiting for? What is your excuse? Your phone is not working or your laptop is not working? Or there’s electric power in the community you reside in, or your day job doesn’t give you the time to do other stuff? My take on this is, if something is important to you, you will find means and ways to overcome all obstacles to get to it.

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I joined Steemit, broke and unemployed. I had no money, nothing, nada. I was desperate for something, for a different perspective at life, for anything. I had lived from hand to mouth for so long that I no longer noticed that I was just surviving. I no longer realized that life could be better than how it was.

When I was introduced to Steemit, I didn’t ask a question besides how do I register and which applications do I need. You can ask @unlimited921 and my brother @damiansessence. I just picked up my scrappy Samsung laptop and started writing. I wrote on my laptop, on my phone with its bad screen and battery. I went to my friends’ homes with my laptop and charger because they had electric power and I didn’t. I sat with friends while they were drinking and I wrote and posted. I was indoors for two weeks, writing, posting, interacting, upvoting, commenting. Because I was determined to get out of the state I was in at that time, i gave Steemit my attention and it gave me love in return.

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I know not everyone will be able to do this. I know you might have a different situation in your life than mine, I also know that nothing is too big to surmount as long as you set your mind to it. If you are determined to make something work, you will do it. It is this state of mind, you have to bring to the table as regards Steemit. You have to be willing to go all out, to go into the rabbit hole and traverse between the mazes, the nooks and alleys of Steemit; you will be amazed at what you find. You might not find gold but you will definitely find yourself and when you do that, you can remold yourself into any image you desire.

I have picked some tips to help one in navigating the Steemit hemisphere; grow your blog, your reputation and your wallet as well. They include;

Find your niche. In the Abuja Steemit Meetup I attended on Saturday, last week, the speakers, who have gone far on the Steemit platform, kept repeating this statement; find a niche. In marketing, it is called USP (Unique Selling Point) what is your unique selling point? What is that thing that you are known for? What is that thing that you would do for free which you do very well? What is that thing that you can talk about from sunup till sundown? You know it, find it, refine it, study the Steemit platform and find a way to infuse it into it. The Steemit platform is opensource for God’s sake. It will take anything you give to it. You will find a place for your niche on it, no matter how weird it may be. There is @dtube, @dmania, @dsound, @dlive and much more. Check them out, do not seat still.

Post at least once a day. If you feel you deserve upvotes then you need to show that you are actively invested in the community. You need to give your active followers something to read, digest and excite themselves about. Post something every day. Put on the bulb in your room if only for five minutes, so your neighbours will know that you are home and if the lights attract them to your window, then to knock on your door and step in for a drink and then a party starts; Wawu! You have done something fruitful that day.

Interact with the community. Commenting on posts cost you bandwidth. Yes it might not yield any returns as not every blogger on Steemit upvotes comments but it gives you visibility. It is a means of advertising yourself for free. Now you want to advertise your intelligence, your superb writing skills and you go on someone’s post and say ‘great post’ because you are looking for SBD; I am sorry, you just lost several SBD worth of traction that you would have gained if you had bothered to read the post and comment sensibly on what you have read. You are selling yourself short when you use those one-liners. It is like walking up to a girl and saying ‘hi’ then staring into her eyes, smiling. She would smile and walk away with the thought in her head that you are a creep.

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Also under interaction, the Steemit chat and the discord app are abounding with many Steemit users. Go there interact with them. Exchange ideas, share stories, make friends. Do all these, not because you seek upvotes from them but do it because you genuinely like them. This is Yahoo messenger people! Facebook chat, hello? You don’t go on Facebook chat to beg for money, do you? You go to chat with friends, woo beautiful girls, arrange parties and meetups, exchange ideas, plan cookouts, yard sales and whatnots. So why are you sliding into people’s dm and bombarding them with links? I have mortgage, school fees, lawyer fees, taxes, school loans, child support, etc on my neck and you come with links of you dancing samba in some deserted beach? Please…

Learn how to use markdown, it will save your life. For a while I was using the Steemit editor to write. I didn’t know where markdown editor was, so I mostly ended up using the html editor, and I know absolutely nothing about html. Some days, I ended up consuming my bandwidth editing my posts over and over again. Now with the markdown editor on my phone, Mardownx, I do the editing then I copy and paste on the Steemit markdown editor. I basically write on Microsoft word, edit on MarkdownX, then paste it on the Steemit markdown editor before posting. Learn how to use the markdown codes and you will have a richer and more pleasant looking content.

Be willing to experiment. Try out new things. Do not box yourself in. What is there to loose, if your experiment in a new form of writing fails or your comedy skit, with you wearing a dolphin suit, falls flat? As long as it is not plagriased material or a NSFW (Not Safe For Work) without the tag, you would only lose upvotes and some esteem. But, Steemit encourages innovation; it encourages uniqueness, willingness to recreate, to bring new forms into the work space, the art world, the literary world. There are works on Steemit today that if published in regular publishing houses, would raise discussions that will go on for centuries. Yes! People are creating and experimenting and the platform is like a rich kid with a huge lab, sponsoring all the mad scientists, artists, and thinkers as they delve into the realm of possibilities. You can be a part of this.

Be willing to go for the long haul. Steemit is not a fart in the air. It will not fade away like most farts do. The cryptocurrency world is here to stay. It might be bent by traditional money institutions but it can never be broken. So don’t do the cash in, cash out thing. Invest your time, but invest only what you can afford to lose. The market is volatile as hell. Stick around for the long haul, steep yourself in the crypto world, in the Steemit world and you will learn so much and do much more.

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I never knew this post will get this lengthy. I guess I have been storing so much in my head for a while now. Do yourself a favour, my friend; go back to your Steemit blog account and look through it. Evaluate it and identify the areas where you have failed. Rework your approach, restructure your content, improvise, adapt, improve and you will, God willing, do well on Steemit. Do have a splendid week.

Stay Steeming.

You can check out related posts here:
Warpedpoetic At Abuja Steemit Meetup

When You Have Had A Bad Day, This Is What Comes Out

What An Almost Blind Man Taught Me About Writing And A Poem

The Law Of Karma And An Eye For An Eye

Why Can't I Write

Financial Wisdom Is Profitable To Direct

My Steemit Diary Week One Run Down

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You can join me on discord servers:
Adsactly

Airhawk-project

Die Hard Steemit

Isle Of Write

Minnow-Power

Project-Atlas

Steemit Poets United

Whaleshares

Peace

©@warpedpoetic.