My Steemit Journey and what I am looking forward to!

Dear Steemit Friends,

I wanted to take some time today to share with you my Steemit Journey. What prompted me to post this was a conversation I was having with a few people on Discord about how they got involved in Steemit and how some of them got to where they are today. There are a great number of new Steemit accounts created daily and Steemit is now considered one of the fastest growing social media platforms comparable to some of the more established platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.

I joined Steemit mid-July in 2016 and have been an investor and active community members ever since. There was a brief period during that time when I stepped away to focus on my move back to the States to further my personal life and career. At that time I had already invested 3 years of my free time mining and trading digital currencies. I frequently checked forums such as bitcointalk to read up and involve myself with newly announced currencies, hoping to be an early adopter of the new "Bitcoin" that would completely change my life.

At the time when Steemit first launched, I remember having 6 Antminer S3+ Units churning away at a loss (primarily because electricity is so expensive in the Philippines) hoping that one day Bitcoin would rise to astronomical heights. I also had one GPU mining rig that I built using parts I collected over the course of 3 months to mine Ethereum.

When I first heard about Steemit, I like most people was attracted to the opportunity to generate passive income for doing something that I did normally on other social media platforms. The ability to make money posting content was appealing because it would only require time and effort without the upfront investment and ongoing cost of mining. Like most dreamy-eyed people, I started by posting an Introduction, which did fairly well, and a number of other posts, which did not do well at all. I admit Steemit was discouraging at first seeing the low to non-existent payouts (with the exception of my intro post) when initially the first thing you notice is the trending page with people making upwards of $20,000 per post (at the time payouts were much greater than they are now.)

What Started to Change?

As a new fish in a big pond of Whales, I decided to start reading posts by some of the top trending content developers. As it is today, I couldn't understand why some of the content was trending, but as I looked deeper I started to find posts that were meaningful and very well written. I eventually started following a few authors and content creators until one day I noticed some posts from @curie. This group was the first group I found that had a mission to identify and help young Steemit members get their content noticed. The only requirement was that you had to write well-written posts which had a good enough amount of content which would then be reviewed and curated for a chance to get an upvote boost. This eventually ended up elevating my posts and helped my content get noticed. At this time I was also introduced to Steemit.Chat.

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This lasted for a good few months until I eventually got to the ceiling where @curie caps there support. This was a fair trade-off since the goal was to get minnows off to a good start and help them build a reputation and following that would eventually allow them to prosper independently and not have to rely on @curie so that the organization could focus on other new minnows who needed support and exposure.

Both tools helped to get me on my way, but as soon as I lost the daily support from @curie, my post rewards began to drop-off. Using Steemit.Chat I found several other resources and groups that I could leverage in order to increase the visibility of my posts. The rewards were nowhere near the payouts I received when @curie was supporting me, but that didn't stop me.

Changing Gears!

What I learned from this experience was that I needed to stop looking at the earnings and focus more on the content. At the same time, because I was so reliant on groups such as @curie, I never really focused on much except myself - which isn't necessarily bad.

Outside looking in - Image Source

I decided I needed to have more of a presence. Being a part of a community means growing with and learning with the community. I started to interact more in Steemit.Chat and venture outside of the "promote-your-post" rooms until one day I met a group of Steemians who told me about Discord Chat and @minnowsupport and @whaleshares - yes more minnow support groups.

I downloaded and installed Discord and ended up joining both communities. Trying to be more social, I began to interact heavily with both Servers and join daily events that each group hosted. I started meeting more and more people and eventually found a number of people who had the same interests as me as well as well as a small group of friends who I interacted with daily. I eventually ended up switching from Steemit.Chat to using Discord as my primary interface to communicate with Steemit community members.

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In both @minnowsupport and @whaleshares I learned how to be a better writer (always a work in progress) and learned about other Steemit projects and initiatives that other community members were working on - some of which I eventually ended up supporting. True - both groups also had resources which would help get my content noticed, but the community is what I was primarily there for. I met a ton of great people.

Doing more for the community

During this time, I had been living and working in the Philippines (expat assignment for roughly 12 years) where I observed that a lot of people struggle to make ends meet. I got the opportunity to meet several like-minded individuals from the Philippines who wanted to make a difference and help spread Steemit-awareness across the country. We made a few failed attempts that didn't really pan out to much, but eventually with the help of groups such as @whaleshares and @minnowsupport, we were able to better organize and dish out some support to the Philippines community.

@luvabi who I met during my early days in @minnowsupport ended up spending a lot of time trying to coordinate events for the PH community and eventually set up the first official meetup. Don't get me wrong, this wasn't the first successful meetup of Steemit users in the Philippines, but this was the very first planned, organized, and sponsored event by a number of organizations and even @ned himself to really introduce and talk about Steemit to the Philippines. The event itself was successful and helped to form the core members and supporters of what is now Steemit Philippines and @SteemPH. After that meetup, the organization really got moving and @steemph quickly grew to become one of the fastest growing communities on Steemit.

It is through this organization where I learned that giving back to the Steemit community and helping it to grow results in greater returns. True, the platform has matured and there are a lot more resources to help minnows and the Steemit community overall prosper - and I do use resources like @sndbox, @utopian-io, and even voting bots to help boost my visibility, but donating my time, funds, and energy to giving back and supporting the community is what has really helped me to prosper.

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Although I have no real skills that I would consider marketable and beneficial I also decided to become a witness. Being a witness for me is having the ability to speak on behalf of the communities I support. It means developing (which I struggle most with) and implementing tools and changes that I think will help the platform and the community prosper. It's having a say in the direction that you think Steemit should head towards and finding things that are broken and hopefully fixing them and making things better. I also learn a lot from other witnesses far smarter than me, which I think is one of the most valuable things of all.

Burnout

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There are so many people who do so much for Steemit and my contribution to the community is fairly insignificant by comparison, but every once in a while, trying to mix responsibilities between Steemit, Family, Work, and real life takes its toll. Everyone, when they put so much time and effort into something and spends day and night trying to succeed, may potentially and eventually get burnt out. This happened to me and it probably won't be the last time, but for a time, I had to step back from Steemit and prioritize other things that were more important to me.

The good news is that anything that I previously helped to start already had a strong foundation and an even better group of passionate people supporting it. My time away was fairly brief, but by the time I came back - the @steemph community had tripled in size. The unorganized chaos had become more organized and smaller yet just as passionate and prosperous branches of the organization had developed. I couldn't be more proud.

I just noticed through some of my ramblings that some of the events in this post may be out of order, but nonetheless were all still part of the journey. Since my return from my short hiatus, I have been trying to be more active while balancing the aspects of my real life. My ongoing goal is to post at least once (or twice a day) while I continue to support the growing number of communities I am part of. There are some communities that I was a part of that I have not been as active in, but my plan is to start being more active in those as well.

What Excites me and what I am looking forward to

First and foremost - Steemit is still young and I believe in its growth potential. There are a lot of developments underway that will transform the landscape. I'm excited about the growth and potential of the various communities I support. Working with so many talented and passionate people makes me feel that my goal of one day disengaging from an everyday average career and solely relying on Steemit as a source of income is possible - this also for community members I support with the same goal by establishing a corporation built solely on Steemit with the focus of unshackling them from jobs that they too aren't passionate about and helping people make a more decent and fairer living on the merits of their own creations.

Updated Statistics care of @penguinpablo

Steemit has been around for a couple of years now and a lot of things have changed. Some good, some bad - all a part of growing. It's still early, but the future looks good. I can't wait to see what happens next and I will continue to grow and prosper with everything that comes along. Steemit has achieved in 2 years what it took Facebook and other social media platforms 4+ years to achieve. Our numbers continue to grow on a daily basis and soon Steemit and platforms built on the blockchain will disrupt and take over all spaces in social media. I will continue to do my part as a witness and member of the community to help Steemit prosper.

Thanks for reading!