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Hello Fellows

Recently I was thinking of how we can get more paid promoted content on Steemit to increase its revenue and that too without those distracting ads. I got one good idea. It's raw, but it will surely work. 

Before that, I wanted to suggest some tweaks to the Steemian's "Blog" page. From the staring itself, the focus of Steemit has been on the public walls like "trending", "new", "hot" and "promoted". Posts are created by users and depending on various algorithms they are sent to one or more public walls. This is good, but for some reason, user's blog page has been completely neglected. There are no sorting options, for example by views, comments, earnings, number of votes etc. Blog page is just arranged in chronological order with latest post or resteem on top. In the current stage it's a mess. 

Your blog page is like your mini site, your display of work; yet there are no tools to complement it, improve it. So here are some of my suggestions. I won't go into much details, they are self-explanatory.

1. As I mentioned on top. Ability to sort articles by views, comments, earnings, number of votes etc. You know all that stuff which porn sites do much much better! 
   **This should be available for both the user and visitors.


2. Ability to hide/show and delete resteems and focus only on author's articles.
   **Now here the hide/show resteem is temporary and serves as a view. User can also delete old or unwanted resteems. As for the visitors, they can only hide/show resteems, but not delete them. 


3. Searching for your own specific articles is a time and energy consuming task, especially if you have a long wall of articles and resteems. Word based search is not that effective. A numbering/tagging system for the articles to better search them.  For example each new article can simply be incremented by+1 article number. We can also have the option to arrange articles by month or year, so we can search the required article easily.
   **Automated while creating a new article.


4. Ability to pin messages, notifications or certain articles. We can say, pin our introduction post, so that visitors can know about us. Maybe pin messages like "on vacation", "offers" etc. But of course pins should be limited to 1-3. **By user only, visible to both user and visitors.


5. Ability to feature articles. This sounds like pin, but it provides much more visibility and clicks. A user can for example, feature his/her most voted article which still has some time to expire. Or maybe an article which they personally think should be read by every visitor to their blog page. **By user only, visible to both user and visitors.


6. View in tile form. Tiles view looks pretty clean, modern and easier to access. Several small tiles cover much less area vertically, than the list style. List style suits better on the public wall like "trending", I guess. Of course we can always experiment with more views. **By user or visitor, visible to both user and visitors. Can be set as a permanent view by the user but only as a temporary view by the visitors.


7. Message option. Visitors can directly message the author, in case they don't want their messages to be public, like in comments or transaction messages in wallet section. **Set up by User, used by visitors.

You will find that many of these features are already present in other social media sites and they prove to be very useful, time and energy saving and more importantly effective for communicating various ideas. Steemit doesn't need to have all features as exclusive, it can always borrow good ideas from other platforms.

Now that blog page suggestions is done, let's move to the paid promotion idea.

Currently the paid promotion on Steemit works like this. Author writes a post and pays some amount of SBD to promote it. The higher he/she pays, the more visible their post is, i.e. placed on top of the Promoted section.

If you see profit wise, then most of the time promoters are in a loss. They rarely cover their promotion cost and even more rarely get any profits. Of course, we can argue that posts aren't promoted for profits, but for visibility. Fair enough. But even visibility wise, they don't do very well. The reason being simple. When you place articles in a different wall of promoted or sponsored, then people are less likely to read them. Therefore the posts don't get as much interest and attention as their promoters would actually expect.

The solution which I have come up with is that, we have a space for sponsored ads on our blog page itself under or above the featured post (mentioned in point 5 above) space. It will be just one single ad on the whole page and it will be attractive, but not distracting.

Now the best thing about is that we don't need to display ads from third party networks. Promoters can simply write their post,  choose plans like pay per impression or click and the ad is placed on user's blog page. Every Steemian visits his/her blog page at least once a day and this ad is sure to grab their attention. This ad can be replicated to "replies" and "comments" page also. 

Some extra ad-ons can be:

1. Higher ad rates for the blog pages of whales. These ads on whale blog pages will not only get the attention of whales, but also of so many visitors who visit these pages.
2. Here I wanted to suggest that a portion of revenue goes to the whales/dolphins also, but then the way some people try to game the Steemit system, I think it won't be a good idea. But maybe, they can still get a small part of the promotion fees and rest goes to the normal promotion account for burning or whatever happens to that SBD.
3. Promoters can take services of authors who post high quality content to create their promoted post. This gives authors more opportunities to earn, than just by post rewards and curation. It is especially beneficial for authors who create high quality posts but don't get enough payouts.

I think in future, when Steemit finally has the human traffic of a big social media site, then we can even expect mainstream companies to create posts and promote them on Steemit. We just need more tools and ideas. 

Let me know what you think about my ideas for blog page and revenue generation. I really hope that Steemit team does some experiments with these ideas!

Regards
Siddartha Gupta
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