Quick Tips And Friendly Advice For New (and Old) Steemians

Recently I have had some friends and family to join steemit and I remember what it was like when I first joined. I was completely lost, didn’t know what to do and how to do it! I tried reaching out to others that I knew on the platform but they were too busy to try and help me get started. With that being said, I thought that I would take a few minutes to write down a few of my own guide lines that I “try” to go by in hopes to try and help others in my circles or any others that may stumble across it.
Now, by no means am I trying to imply that I’m an expert on the steemit platform or that I’m a huge success or anything. But, I can say that I have come a long way since last summer. Also remember that these are just friendly tips and my opinions of how a steemit account should be run. Feel free to pick and choose which, if any parts of this post that may help you.

Don’t SPAM! This is a HUGE NO-NO in my book! Spamming can be done in several different ways. One popular method is for new members to make a comment on someone’s post asking to be followed or voted for. Another method of spamming is trying to promote your own post in the comment section of someone else’s post by posting the link to your page. This isn’t really rocket science so if it feels like you’re spamming someone then you probably are.

Quality Posts and Over Posting: This is pretty important guys! Think about building your reputation from the ground up here. I’ve followed some guys that were pumping out 20 posts per day, every day of nothing but pure garbage. Needless to say that I don’t follow them anymore but in their head, they thought that the more posts that they got out, the more exposure they got and the more money they would make. This might work if you’re lucky but I wouldn’t try it myself. More than likely you will develop several people in your feed. Just imagine the same person flooding your feed every day with shitty posts. Trust me when I say that it will get old fast and you will either mute the person or delete them all together. Quality posts are also more likely to earn you higher rewards as well as respect.

Be Consistent: It’s very important to stay consistent on this platform if you want to be successful on it. If you’re spotty with your posting and commenting, then you might get forgotten easily. Also, putting in constant work on the block-chain will result in constant cash flow (hopefully). This is really important to the people that follow me because I have such a bad memory and I follow so many people, my feed is always flooded. But if you make comments regularly on my posts, then chances are good that I’m either going to give you a good upvote or visit your page and/or both just because you're in my recent thought.

Quality Replies: Ohhh, here’s another good one lol! Guys, there’s nothing more insulting than for someone to spend hours on writing an article or working on a post just to see someone leave a generic comment that is unrelated to the topic. I have seen this hundreds of times and it never serves the person well. The person doing it is trying to spam or manipulate the system by going around copying and pasting as many comments as he or she can in attempts to get promoted faster. It would be like someone leaving a comment like this on this exact post: : “Great photos, please follow me for votes!”. That’s actually a double whammy. It’s spam and a generic comment lol.

Be Original: Do your own thing and be good at it! Don’t try to plagiarize because chances are that you will get caught by the cheetah bot that patrols the posts. I’ve also had someone to steal my material that the cheetah missed but a fellow steemian caught one time, it was pathetic.

False Flagging: This isn’t like YouTube and you just can’t go around trolling and false flagging everyone without repercussions. Chances are great that if you start doing this, your account reputation will be smashed so bad that your comments can’t be viewed due to your low rating. There’s also great support teams that can assist with people that plagiarize and cause trouble. On here, the community does a great job of policing it’self!

Give Credit: Always give credit where credit is due. If you obtain information from WikiLeaks, then you should cite them in your post. Same thing goes for other steemians, if you got an idea from another steemians article, then you should give them credit and post a link to their article.

Give! Try to look at using this platform as more of giving than receiving and I think you will do better imo.

Loyalty! Be sure to take care of your loyal followers! This is a big thing for me. I will never forget the first person that helped me on here and I try to always be loyal. I also try to treat the people good that frequently support my work. On steemit, there are apps for everything. Your phone can notify you of everything that happens to your account. You can be notified if someone stops or starts following you, comments on your post, reply to your comment and even tells you what percentage of a vote they gave you! So there’s not much excuse not to take care of your loyal supporters.

Self-Voting: Cough, Cough! I don’t know if I want to even mention this topic or not lol. This has and probably still is a sensitive subject and it’s not one that I care to argue about. I will however give my opinion on it and mention the opinions of others I know on the subject. But chances are great that if you are just starting on here, you don’t know what’s frowned upon and what is considered proper so I will give you my OPINION. If I write an article then I will upvote my own post, especially if it’s one that I put a lot of time and effort in to. Some people think this is not ethical but the majority of the people I know consider it okay to vote their own post up. Voting your own comments left on other’s posts ….mehhhh! This one is actually frowned upon by most everyone I know (Even some whales) so I don’t do it. Now, I could see an exception to that if like someone asked me a question that required an in-depth and time consuming answer and I spent a lot of time replying to someone, but that would probably be the only time I would do it, if I even would do it.

Voting for Others: Voting for others can be confusing when you first start out, I know it was for me. After a certain point, you will get a slider that you can control the percentage of vote strength you give someone. When you’re at 100% voting strength, you get like 10 full power votes (If I’m not mistaken, please correct me if I am.) and after that your strength starts to go down and in turn the value of your vote goes with it. Then after my power is depleted, it needs time to replenish. It doesn’t take much time but I try not to let mine get below 80% power. I like to give full power votes so my power gets drained pretty quickly. Everyone uses their votes differently. I feel like I’m generous with mine, although I only vote on things that I think deserve a vote. What I think deserves a vote will be different than yours. I try to vote the peoples posts that show up in my feed, although I can’t possibly do this for everyone of course. People that regularly leave genuine comments on my posts usually get votes too. It’s common for new people to think that voting for someone costs them money when it doesn’t. I thought the same thing when I started. I thought that when I voted for a comment and saw a penny show up and then the next vote showed zero, I was like “Well, I gave all my money away.” Lol. It was just that my account wasn’t worth hardly any money and therefor my vote wasn’t worth much money. But like now for example, if I voted for a comment and it was worth a dollar, that dollar doesn’t come out of my account. So don’t be afraid of voting for material that you want to vote for, it actually helps you! Like I mentioned earlier, look at it as giving rather than receiving and you will go far!

Witness: When I first started, I was bombarded with different people wanting me to vote for them to be a witness. At the time, I had no clue what a witness was or anything. A witness is an extremely important responsibility in this blockchain and voting for someone should be a serious thing. I voted for the guy just because I thought he seemed nice :/ lol. But, I didn’t know any better and that’s why I’m trying to give you guys a heads up. If someone wants you to vote for them as a witness, do your research on what a witness does and then investigate the person asking.
I’m sure that there are other things that I have left out but these are some really great basic tips to think about implementing in your own steemit journey. I hope this has helped someone and if I can answer any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.