My first progress report about Steemit

It is now 3 days that I have started with Steemit and I want to write down what I have learned so far. So instead of writing this on a word doc, I decided to write it directly on steemit so that other people can compare their own progress with mine and maybe give me some additional tips.

Starting without a clue...

Probably like any other new steemit user I just started without a clue about the whole thing. I just wrote my first blogpost, liked... a sorry... upvoted all the comments that I got from bots and commented whatever came along. I upvoted posts that I liked that were 2 years old... The result of my work was... let's say not really encouraging.

You need steem power above everything

Without steem power you are worth nothing on steemit. Your posts, comments and upvotes have hardly any value and only in the best cases you will get $0.01. You can either go the long way, accumulate the $0.01 over time and then hope to become more and more "steem powerful"... There is a shortcut however. You can actually buy steem power with bitcoins or ether on services like blocktrades. So I had some btc in a wallet that I wasn't using and just bought some steem. Well this is not enough. You actually have to transform this steem (power up) into steem power. So I just did that and invested all the steem into steem power. A piece of advice: if you do the same, keep some of it in steem so that you can pay bots... This cost me a second investment into steem...

You can also get more steem by choosing to get 100% power up when you post an article instead of the standard 50/50 (steem, steem power). Like that all your income will be in steem power.

Upvoting is a science

Ok somewhere I read about voting power and that this is not unlimited... Well you have 100% voting power but with every upvote that you give, your voting power is declining. This voting power is regenerating so a good tip is to vote regularly but to wait between votes so that the power can regenerate to stay around 100%.

Even like that, one should not upvote just everything. First it is a loss of power to upvote comments. Then when you upvote a post it is really important when you do that. If you do it too early all the income of your upvote goes to the author. If you do it too late, you will not get anything at all. For well paid posts, upvote around 5 to 10 minutes after the post has been published. For post that do not generate so much, upvote around 25 to 28 minutes after the creation of the post. Never upvote later than 7 days after the post was written...

Next step - hello bots

It seems that bots can be really helpful for newbies but you have to pay them for it. So you need steem. I found this nice article about bots by @gingerninja and I definitely want to try it out with this article.

I will write a new progress report soon to tell you how this went...