There are a few good posts about how to keep it together on steemit and that you need to keep trying. To be fair, I was also a bit disappointing when I saw only dan upvoted my steem.ly post. It was a lot of work and money that were invested in steem.ly and little roi. Maybe it even was bad timing. i don't know. I also had high hopes seeing that introduceyourself posts had 9-12-19k and I had about 200 bucks.
But I kept going man and it looks better. Really. Focus on what Steemit was built for primarily: Content, valuable content.
Think about it, create it and most importantly participate: vote and comment. You'll see the results in time. We all will.