Would You Resteem an Ad for $2.50? PLUS My eBook Promotion Results!
9 Resteems
1 Book review on Amazon
21 eBooks sold
Writing: One main article promoting the book and announcing how the upvote system will work, two articles reminding readers about the promotion.
Value of 100% upvotes: About 60 cents each; two upvotes were given per resteem/review.
Total amount given out: $0.60 * 2(9 resteems + 1 review)=$12
Steem Power held: 3000
Cost of leasing 3000 SP for one week: about $75 (I didn’t lease, but this is the going rate on Minnowbooster) at 25% APR.
Actual out of pocket costs for me: None.
Some of my above prices were estimated using Minnowbooster’s current market prices for reference. The difficulty there is timing your steem lease. There are currently 223 new lease requests, so if you want to lease steem power you’ll need to bid up your APR to get it snatched quickly, or coordinate with a delegator ahead of time (who will lend you the steem power). Your other choice is to allow random chance to determine if your request is picked up, but good marketing needs tighter timelines.
I started this campaign with 3000 steem power already available. It cost me nothing but my time to upvote those who resteemed or reviewed my book on Amazon, and I gave them two 100% upvotes (so about $1.20 total) each. That should have dropped down to $0.50 SBD and .125 SP once they were paid out. With SBDs currently above $4, resteemers earned over $2.50 USD between their SBD and SP.
To summarize, over $50 USD was given to steemians for taking part in this marketing experiment, at no cost to me.
Would You Resteem an Advertisement for $2.50?
Every post on steemit fights for attention from the rewards pool. The early adopters here have taken advantage of very cheap steem to get a lot of SP for their articles, which haven’t had to compete with professionals.
This will change soon, if steem is to be a successful cryptocurrency.
Advertising doesn’t happen here the same way it does on Facebook. Steemians create content, which fights for a portion of the rewards pool. The rewards allow steemians to have more control over the content of the platform. Better content will bring more people, more people bring advertisers, and those advertisers will need to buy steem or steem power to play.
We’ve already attracted Engadget onto steemit, which will write some original content for our platform (it’s already crossposting some of its articles here). How soon until Tech Crunch shows up? HuffPo? Sites with huge followings can repost on steem at no cost and fight for a portion of the rewards pool. This is the future of the steem blockchain.
My question above is important: would you resteem an ad for $2.50? Maybe you’d do it for a fellow steemian, but would you do it for Nike? If not, how about $10? $20? Would you resteem something for $1? These are questions professional marketing teams will be answering as they begin to use our platform.
For now, I think it is incredibly cheap to market something on steemit. I’m going to make a few tweaks and do another promotion for my book in a couple days, so if you want to take part in it keep following me and wait a day or two until it starts.
Better than Bots?
One of the most common methods of gaining votes and attention has been the use of bots. I think the biggest problem with bots is they don't provide targeted content. I have yet to find a bot that offers content that interests me, so the resteems a bot provides are so much noise(1). I think bribing my followers with upvotes may be a more effective method than bribing a whale bot with steem, but until I can actually test that in some sort of controlled manner, it remains a hunch.
In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on steemit marketing in the comments below!
-Jeff
Check out my book for more information on cryptocurrency trading. Free for Amazon Unlimited readers!
(1) Bots that offer targeted content might be very effective. DCEUbot for news on the next DC movie, or LibertyBot that curates and resteems articles focused on libertarian issues might be really effective. We'll see...this will happen as more people consistently post content to this platform.
Hey everybody new be sure to follow this guy 😁 , Iv been on Steem since about last summer and just now really starting to use it about a month ago but you want to make friends and follow these kind of folks bc those whales don’t care about you, you have a better chance at getting votes or engagement by ppl like @protegeaa , ppl who actually use their Steem lol , I have commented on tons of ppls post mainly whales and have never got replies, comments , or upvotes , so just saying as a tip build a circle of ppl who actually use their Steem often not just those who make post and have a high ego knowing they can post and make instant high upvotes , it’s something to Remeber , a reminder to our self , when were become a whale one day don’t act stuck up 😎
Hey Justin, thanks for the kind comments-just saw your YouTube comment and if you can hold off a bit I will set up a new promo this week for my book and you can resteem that for some upvotes.
Thank you!
Yes shhiiure lol sounds good
Oooh this is the book you was taking about ! 🤔
Yep!
That's an interesting question. One of the things I really enjoy about Steemit is the lack of ads on the sides. Facebook was like that for a while, then they added ads on the sides. Then they added ads in the feeds. Soon it was cluttered. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before big companies start profiles and get people resteeming for cash. It seems inevitable, but hopefully we can be at peace for a little while longer.
It would be a balance...it might not even work if people were too obnoxious in their resteeming.
This is all an experiment, and I'm eagerly watching while it all plays out. I don't expect to see ads in line with the content on steemit.com, but I'd be willing to accept it IF it required a large purchase of steem power for a company to do that.
Maybe another domain could try that model and make a much better UI than steemit.com. Sort of like busy.org but ad supported.
They do say "everything in moderation." If they started doing some type of sponsored content, it wouldn't be the end of the world, but often what happens is they get carried away and "maximize revenue" which decreases the value of the platform because people don't want to deal with the overload of garbage.
I'm with you in regards to this being an experiment. We don't know what's going to happen, but hopefully some changes of that magnitude would at least be put before the witnesses. Although they could be self-serving if they knew the ads could bring them more revenue, they might be more interested in preserving the asset they have and growing it organically for the long-term.
Yeah, if you created a UI that had limited ads and worked more smoothly than Steemit, you could probably make a lot of money if you got people to switch to it. I'm not quite that savvy. ;) If you do it, let me know and I'll check it out!
The difference with steem, though, is that in order to maximize revenue, they're going to need to buy into the platform. That's should drive the price of steem up-the only way to get it, after all, is to create good content that gets upvoted or buy it on the open market. I think the more popular steemit gets, the more people are going to keep their steem locked up in steem power.
This is why I think steem power delegation is so important to this platform-there is an increasing demand for leasing SP and that makes SP an even greater asset for holders.
Astute. Yeah, to pay people on the platform they'll need SBD or Steem. Or they'll have to have SP to use to "pay" for the resteems/votes/whatever. That would drive the price up. Good thoughts.
(you hear an engine rev and horn honk)
MEEP! MEEP!
(the window on the humvee rolls down to reveal a warm smiling face)
"Hello! I'm @shadow3scalpel and with the help of my protege, @chairborne, we are actively assisting veterans, retirees and active servicemen and women here on Steemit. We feel it is our 'duty' to support each other. Any questions or comments you may have, simply respond to this comment, thank you!"
(the window rolls up and the engine roars as it drives to the next person on the list)
Comment by @killerwhale. This is a opt-in bot.
Congratulations on being a published author! You're doing an amazing job here on steemit as well.
Thank You!
Nice post my frends
Great post
Everyone can learn here about how to use steemit to marketing needs that show us again why steemit is the social network of the future
Everyone has his or her individual price tag... So it's only a matter of time, till selling reteems will increase popularity so that marketing companies stepping in. Targeting should be not that hard, because advertisers past posts and their category tags are easily accessible and could ve used for indicating the worth of an advertiser for the required category.