Giving my best articles a new home while learning about the blogging life on Steemit

I've been blogging since 2006 and named my blog, The Digital Firehose. For years I would post here and there and just leave it at that. Then I started to get serious about posting in 2012 and became more regular, more disciplined. I learned from someone that practicing an art actually helped someone beat cancer. I'm not sick, but I'd like to use my writing proactively, to prevent the onset of illness. I find ideas to write about every day and I need a release. I find that release in writing. I write to live.

Over time, I figured out ways to promote my work and figured out how to use social media to great effect. I used Twitter and learned how to build a following. I used Facebook groups and brought readers from there, too. I also figured out how to use Google+. I guess I'm old school because I haven't really moved beyond that.

The caveat for me is that in most social media, our content is used to generate advertising revenue, and I get that. I was OK with that for awhile because I didn't believe that any alternatives existed. What I mean by alternatives, is that I didn't believe that there was an alternative to ad supported blogging platforms. Medium seems to provide that alternative, but they are losing money and are now figuring out a way to reward content creators in order to rebuild their business. They seem to have noticed that people have a bit more enthusiasm about creating content when they're compensated. Steemit is the first blogging platform that I've seen to find a way to directly reward content creators and do it without ads.

Steemit is a subversion of the effort to create content. In most well known content platforms available today, the content is used to generate ad revenue. The ad revenue is shared between the hosting platform and the content creator and goes to benefit the advertisers, with Google or Facebook being the best examples of this. They take the lion's share of the revenue since they're hosting the platform. What I like about Steemit is that it offers me a way to generate content, earn a little bit of money and allows me a way to avoid supporting large advertising monopolies with my content.

Given what I know now, my enthusiasm is building for Steemit and I intend to spend more time here at my schedule permits. This means that I must slowly abandon Blogger and let it go. There is a certain amount of grief that goes with this. I have close to 900 article published there on Blogger, with more than 380k pageviews for the life of that blog. Now I feel the tug of Steemit and feel that it is time to move on. 

Writing is the act of cultivating ideas. For cultivation to be successful, fertile ground must be found to plant the seeds of those ideas. As I blog here, one day at a time, I will import my most popular articles here. I will also bring some of the articles I had the most fun writing here, too. I will pepper them throughout my day to day blogs, to give the best of my articles a more permanent home, while staying current with a new audience. I hope to find fertile ground here, on Steemit.