Beginner's Guide For Steemies | Part 5 - Posting and Tagging
Lessons:
Part 1 - Intro
Part 2 - Registering and Keys
Part 3 - Account, Wallet, and Tokens
Part 4 - Getting Steem
Part 5 - Posting and Tagging
Part 6 - Tribes
Part 7 - DApps
Part 8 - Curating
Part 9 - Delegating
Part 10 - Stat Tracking and Transaction Searching
Part 11 - Key Managing
Part 12 - Steem Engine
Part 13 - SMTs, Bonus Stuff, and Conclusion
Postings
"Okay! So I'm ready to begin posting. Let's get to it! I have so many cat pics to share."
Cool your jets there and back the train up for a moment! Yes, it's highly encouraged to be active and post a lot on the platform, but remember "Quality over Quantity". Now of course, blogs don't have to be Shakespearean or arts have to be Michelangelonian to be deemed "quality", however, poorly written posts, poor artworks, any post with poor substance, or any post that don't have anything interesting or relatable in them for examples won't win over a lot of support and upvotes.
Remember Two Things:
- Everyone especially newer accounts have a limited amount of voting power (VP) in a day and it recharges only so much throughout the day.
- Downvotes do exist. If someone from the community see a post as too poor quality, they can possibly downvote it.
So with those two things in mind, nobody is just gonna freely upvote and reward any post willy-nilly. Same for comments. You'll get a corresponding percentage of their upvote or no upvote based on the quality of your post like something interesting, informative or entertaining for examples. Of course, if you are new, you probably won't get much upvoting as well since you are just starting to build your account. That's okay though!
"So what if my posts are not good enough and it's considered poor quality?"
At worst usually, just less potential upvotes or no upvotes. But if your are larger known, you could possibly attract some downvotes. You would have to try really hard and be really lazy in quality of content to get downvoted badly much less downvoted period. Of course, the bigger you get, eventually you'll probably get a few downvotes regardless of how good it is. Just like on Youtube videos, there's always going to be a critic or a hater.
Posts
With the above in mind, to make a good post and get yourself upvotes, don't pressure your yourself! Just...
- Make interesting posts you got;
- Avoid just posting only pics or super small writings with no substance, don't have to be a long book descriptions though;
- Don't be afraid to share interesting stories;
- Share detailed and important information;
- Share your creations;
- Share your music;
- Share your videos;
- Comment and engage with others' posts;
- Make sure your posts are grammatically well written;
- And most importantly, have fun with it!
Want more info about posts and comments, you can check out this article here.
Also, when writing out a post, be sure to use the markdown guide to help you format your posts to your liking and beauty. You can usually find it at the top likely right side corner outside of your text box. The page will look similar to this or pages will have this. Steemit's Markdown Guide
Tagging
This is probably as equally as important as doing a good post itself. Good effective tagging can get you good engagement with your content. How to do this:
- Start off by using the Steemit tag list as a guide. Research about a tag if not sure what it is.
- Your 1st tag is the most important! Choose the highest engaged category or tribe that fits the content the best.
- Your 2nd tag should relate too and if possible be a the highest or among highest payout category.
- In relation, find underserved tags. Tags with few posts but high payouts.
- Use tribe tags. Communities of like-minded and similar interested folks will likely welcome and upvote your post.
- Use ALL 5 tags as much as possible! Don't leave potential exposure on the table!
- Some Steem platforms allow 10 or so tags. Use as much as you can there as well. (Learn more about this later.)
- DON'T use unrelated and arbitrary tags. It clutters community tags and could create a chance of you getting downvoted.
- Don't just use random words for tags. They don't do a darn thing for you.
- You could use one tag as an unique tag to represent a brand or community. But if you are new or don't have enough engagement for your account, it likely won't be effective. So it's NOT advised to start off with.
So essentially what I think a good tagging order formula from the knowledge I leaned and seen here:
Highest Engaged > Highest Payouts/Underserved > Tribes > Your Unique Tag
NSFW Posts
Folks can post their risqué posts on Steemit platform. But be sure to tag your post with a "nsfw" in the tags for post etiquette so your post has a warning filter before folks click the post. Failure to do so could likely get your post downvoted and flagged by the community reducing payouts and maybe account reputation.
Censorship Free
For folks who worry about their articles, videos, or artwork taken down for whatever unfair reasons, then you'll be happy to know since this is blockchain, no content can't be removed off the blockchain. The community on the curation end controls what gets viral or what gets less seen, and on the author end, they control what gets posted and what gets taken down. At most, either the community can downvote a content until it's "hidden" but still accessible, or the author themselves can delete it off the platform and not be shown, but neither will remove the post off the blockchain itself.
But with this comes responsibility too because once again no content can't be removed off the blockchain! Which means once it's posted, it's on there forever archived on the blockchain. But before getting afraid of that, this is nothing new you haven't already dealt with since it's the same principle for anywhere online in general. ;) Once you post something online, it's there permanently!
So now, with all of this said, you're probably wondering what are these "tribes" now. So let's look at that in the next post!
