Happy 42nd day on Steemit Birthday to Armadilloman! Whooooopeeeee! Keep the cards and letters coming!
 
I was planning on writing a 30 day Steemit Bday tome brimming with hard earned wisdom and observations, but my 30th day hit when I was in one of my “what’s the use as long as I am a lowly plankton” funks that hits about every 72 hours and instead did something that at the time (started watching Fargo season 2) seemed more profitable. But here I am, twelve days later brimming with Steemit optimism, and 288 hours wiser (and all the way through Fargo) and ready to give my report of random observations and suggestions for plankton and minnows alike to make your Steemit adventure a happy and prosperous one. 

Hit me with your best shot! Fire away!

Number one thing I learned quickly on Steemint is to lead with the content that the most steemians you can gather in a tribe, want to consume. That seems obvious but it wasn’t to me at first.  I suggest, that in those first few weeks, throw all you do well and are interested in at the steemit wall and run with what sticks and whatever gets the most attention. You may come here as a writer, and that may be where you will end up earning your fame and fortune… someday. But when you start as less then a plankton (an organic compound not quite alive yet really) you have to pour your energy into what people want to see and look at.  It may not immediately be your fiction writing, but instead your flair for macramé or your 100 recipes using organic turnips that gets the most eyeballs, votes and follows. I did not come to Steemit to be a resident leather artist.  I actually came to Steemit to do something else then my day-to-day work and the last thing I came to do was generate more leather work for myself. I spent 25 years in the TV video production world. I have worked as a professional smartass/writer and photographer and market gardener. I threw much of that at the Steemit wall and the leather craftsman stuck. So that is the branding I will develop. The rest (writing, photographer, gardener) I will blog someday when I have more followers and rep. Fellow minnows, if you want to have something on Steemit to build on, and you have multiple interests and skills, choose the one that gets the most eyeballs first to build a base of attention and create a brand for yourself.  
 

I’m so dizzy, my head is spinning. Like a whirl pool it never ends.  You're making me dizzy...

Steemit is the most confusing thing I have done in years and the learning curve is quite steep. Those who have been here a while may not realize how bewildering this place is when you first get here. Jargon and buzz phrases, and etiquette and protocol and this chat room and that channel and this curration bot and that initiative and this way to make money and this way to not. When you stand back a ways, it looks like chaos. I spent a solid week trying to make some sense of it (at day 42 there is still some things that I find quite bewildering) I read countless posts purporting to simplify this or that and while some did explain well, some were so obtuse and presuming so much prior understanding that they made the issues they were trying to simplify even more mystifying. Confused Minnows hang tough. It starts to make sense in a few weeks. I made a file of bookmarks of posts that explained a Steemit something or other, even the posts that made no sense at the time, and reread them every few days in the light of the new things I was learning. Now after 42 days, I can go back and reread these posts and actually not get a tension headache and understand what they are saying. The confusion does eventually start to clear.
 

Mighty engines roar! Turbo charged for more! Drive four on the floor! Go!

 

Power up, power up, power up! When I first got here I didn’t get the whole notion behind powering up. I was very hesitant to lock up anything for 3 months. The closer to liquid (as if any crypto can be called anything close to liquid, except maybe the bitcoin I hear you can spend at a Starbucks in Canada and on taxes in Arizona.) the happier I was. But minnows hear this…you are nothing, can’t be anything without steem power.  More income potential, more attention, more influence, less headaches (like bandwidth problems) are yours with more Steem Power.  Minnows, if you can’t just buy your way into fat SP, find yourself a project that gets you more Steem and SBD to convert to SP.  I am going to be opening a small steemit leather shop offering 4 or 5 Steem/Steemit branded leather items with nearly all of the proceeds going to powering up.  Do you have something you can make? Or something you can sell for steem? Post it on the #happystore page and let the proceeds power you up.  

  

Domo arigato, Mr., Roboto….

 

At first when I clicked on a post that had a dozen comments and only two are from certifiable human beings and the rest are obviously generated by silicon and code, it creeped me out. And I wondered how long until someone comes up with a convincing post generator bot (and maybe there is such a thing and I haven’t seen it) that just makes love to the vote bots and walks the progeny of copious rewards to the bank without a single wasted human keystroke. If this caught on, we could all step away from the computers, with nothing to do but lie about and breed, just letting the bots dance with each other and get rich. But…after a day of exploring bots, I familiarized myself with their operation and began to see their usefulness and realized they are a part of the landscape here and how the game is played. Fellow minnows, the best use you can put a bot to is not to get an upvote but to get your post onto trending and seen by more real humans. Use vote bots to promote your post so that you can get a group beyond your followers to take a look. Here are a couple I have explored that seem to work well… @honestbot, @minnowbooster, @smartsteem, @morwhale, @thundercurator.  I will be continuing to experiment with bots in the next few weeks and will report back what I find.

Thank you for being a friend…I want to thank you…thank you for being a friend…

Most of the math surrounding Steemit is very complex. The secret for gaining followers is simple-- be a friend, get a friend. Try to spend an hour or two every week just greeting new folks and an hour interacting with followers. Really read their posts and write a good paragraph responding. Ask people questions about what they have written or posted. Be more then just a curation bot and people will respond, follow you and actually become something better…friends. Steemit is a great place to practice “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Fellow minnows, if you want attention to your posts, give attention to other's posts.  If you want eyeballs on your blog, read and comment on others blogs. If you want lots of upvotes for your deserving creations, be generous with your votes to the deserving posts of others. If you need a hand, give a hand. If I can wax biblical again…”give and it will be given to you” is truer here then on any other social media you have experienced.

I lost on jeopardy, baby, ooooooh, oooooh, ooooooh….

I love playing and hosting contests on Steemit. I am good enough at some of them that I keep the SBD trickling in even if my latest post is a wildly fabulous bust. Minnows enter every contest you can! I look for new contests to enter every day. There are guessing games, lotteries, writing, photo, and art contests. There are dozens and dozens on any given day. Go to the contest tag and scroll down the “new” section to be first in with your entries. And along with entering every contest, Minnows can host a giveaway or contest themselves to gain followers. Particularly one that cements in people’s minds who or what you are trying to brand yourself as. Are you a musician? Give away downloads (or that dinosaur age technology, CDs) Are you a collector? Give away something from your collection. Are you an artist? Give away some art. Anyone can find something to give away and gain a few dozen followers to boot.  My personal favorite contests so far have been the crypto guess the closing price games provided by @revelationquotes.    

If I could turn back time....If I could find a way.... 

Minnows, here is the list of things I wish I would have done earlier in my Steemit career if I had the chance to start over again.
 

1) I would not have made my intro post as soon as I got here, but instead would have read and posted on other peoples blogs for a week or so and gained some experience interacting before I tried to explain just who I am. I would have probably made a better, more relevant post that didn’t die a few hours after it was made had I spent more time observing the Steemit way before I plunged in.
 

2) Sign up for busy.org right away and use the busy tag to simplify, beautify and organize the somewhat ugly and messy Steemit interface.
 

3) I wish I would have signed up to SteemFollower, a subset of steemit that pares down a news feed so that you can concentrate on voting and commenting on a smaller content set and a that same smaller group (something like 14 thousand) can concentrate on seeing your posts. It works and on good days accounts for 5-10% of the activity on my blog. You can sign up from the link below.
 

4)I wish I had set up some passive income as soon as I was able. You need 15 Steem Power to make transactions on the block chain. Any beyond that can be deligated to worthy individuals, projects and organizations. In return you will be paid back interest in SBD. Another passive income source that I am exploring is selling your unused votes. This allows your voting to make a return even when you are not using them and unless you are voting in your sleep and at church, you are not using them all the time. @minnowbooster has an easy to use way to sell your unused votes.
 

5) If I could go back in time to my first days on Steemit, I would focus on powering up as number one priority.
 

 

I can go on and on, but I will save that for happy a happy 62nd day post.  Its been an exciting, fascinating, profitable and sometimes depressing 42 days and I look forward to many more.
 

ANNOUNCING A CONTEST!  I will send 0.10 SBD to the FIRST person who names ONE artist and song title for ONE of the the song lyrics in the headings of this post in the comments below AND upvotes and resteems this post.  IF YOU ENTER MORE THEN ONE SONG/ARTIST OR ENTER MORE THEN ONCE BY COMMENTING MULTIPLE TIMES WITH AN ANSWER YOU WILL BE DISQUALIFIED.  Enjoy!

 
 
 As always, feel free to ask me any questions about, life, leather work and the universe.  Upvote, follow and re-steem if you want to see more content like this.

WANT MORE VOTES AND FOLLOWS?  Sign up for these free applications and get GUARANTEED upvotes and followers!  

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"I have read, edited, and approved Armadilloman's post" -- Wanda Petronski