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Outline

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This series aims at discussing the following topics

- Followers and following

- Creating a niche

- Input and output

- Thoughts on trending

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Followers and following

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Personally, there was a time when I used to confuse both terms and I realized that the amount of followers you have has little or nothing to do with your output generated both in reality and on social media platforms.

You could have ten thousand followers and more than 90% of them will turn out to be ghost followers, then what is the essence of racking up ten thousand followers in the first place.

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Before steemit, those who are familiar with other platforms will discover that those platforms have something in common, you could have a lot of followers and still not feel their impact when you sometimes post constructive content, but you will be amazed at the level of activeness they possess when you paste things that are detrimental or scandalous.

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Someone said that likes on other platforms are cheap and overrated, so we sometimes undermine it's importance. You could have ten thousand likes and still be poor, you could have all the shares and retweets and still be hungry at the end of the day. But over here, each vote (both upvote and downvote) counts so you have to make sure you have the right set of followers not the follow for follow routine followers.

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Speaking about follow for follow, the concept is nice, however, we have to realize that like every other thing which has a nice foundation, it can easily be abused. Most of the time, the follow for follow crew seethe need to rack up a following but then it is one sided, they mostly see the need to receive votes but hardly keep up with voting others.

Another problem of the follow for follow crew or upvote for upvote is that it promotes spam and plagiarism when abused, that itself defeats the purpose of quality and creativity.

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The essence of followership is basically to get "people with the same madness as you" on your list, so that when you produce a content, you will see the kind of comments that will give you the encouragement you need to write more. It does not happen immediately, you have to work hard, produce constant quality content, make the right comments and at the right time, you will gather the right crowd.

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It's not possible to have a monopoly on those that will follow you, but this should act as a guide when selecting who you'll follow so that you don't get confused when people take no interest in your work.

Following the wrong people is like trying to get a new born to understand calculus, the understanding is not there. If the wrong people with no interest in your work follow you, they will simply not give your work the attention it deserves.

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At first, it might seem absolutely amazing to build thousands of following, but then again over time it dawns on you that, one single person could fill in the void for ten thousand absentees.

Someone who is looking for good feed back will focus more on audience, so the purpose is defeated when 90% of them are dead followers expecting you to solely vote them.

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Creating a niche

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By definition, a niche is the role an organism play in relation with it's environment, but this is not biology, it's steemit. Let me define it according to the steemit language: It is your unique function in this domain.

Steemit is not for free loaders, it was not designed for those with the mindset to always take, it was designed for those who know how to engage the community.

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I do jokingly tell people that the first rule of whale participation on your blog is good engagement, because when you have the right stuff, you get the right people.

A quick tip when building a niche is knowing your area of strength. For example, if you are an eloquent speaker, you might consider running interviews or better still a weekly game show like the Wednesday beer contest.

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Another example is if you are used to causing conflict wherever you are, you can channel that to positive use through a critic gossip column. You could focus on scandals or better still stir up rumors to spice things up. Speaking of which, no one is running a decent gossip column here that I know of, why not start one?

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If you are funny, you could do funny skits and upload to D-tube, if you can dance, promote your talents here. If you can sing, play musical instruments, if you can even cook, you can open a cooking school online instead of the occasional random cooking we come across.

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Building a niche also involves one critical thing which is learning from those in the game. I always tell people instead of beefing those ahead of you, befriend them and learn. Trust me every experience counts, perhaps there is something that person has to offer that you are not seeing or you don't know about.

Follow a community or start one with people of like minds. If you think you are a geek or science nerd, well head on to the steemstem community and go and test your knowledge.

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The truth is people perish for lack of knowledge, instead of feeling like you already have a map of the place as a newbie, humble yourself be you a newbie or not and focus on learning. When @samminator a guy that was mentored through the genesisproject made mention of steemstem, even the leaders of genesisproject kept mute and listened and right now a lot of science inclined authors have found their roots. Their knowledge is always being constantly challenged and I am proud when I hear the discuss their topics among themselves without fear of someone stealing their idea.

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In essence, when creating a niche, choose something that suits you.

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Input and output

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Garbage in garbage out, the quality of the content you put out, determines the quality of reward you receive for your value.

It is worthy of note that if you don't have a passion for what you are doing, it becomes evident with time and trust me when I say this, there is nothing more embarrassing than realizing that what you dabbled into was not your calling.

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Your passion should drive your input and you will get rewarded for your passion. The difference between an expensive sport athlete and his/her peers is the passion. Sure he might seem expensive, but the passion to be the best in his field and not simply earn sets him/her ahead of others.

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Your passion should set you ahead, like I said "find those suffering from the same madness as you and be mad together." A successful scientist should not be your target of envy if you are not totally science inclined.

Write on what you are comfortable with or what you know more about. Don't dabble without adequate research and don't write because you feel the need to, write because you have something meaningful to contribute to the community.

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A plagiarist has zero input, the reason is because there is really no passion in copying another person's passion so that is zero input.

Before hitting the submit button, ask yourself this question: "If you were the owner of steemit, will you allow this sort of content to get to the top?"

Quick tip: There is no specified amounts of words to create a good content, just use your discretion and make it work.

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Thoughts on trending

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The mistake most new people make is that they believe the trending page is actually for the best content, it is not. In my humble opinion, the trending page only offers the ultimate form of visibility and should be seen as the home of visibility.

I also believe that some of the best content on the platform are undiscovered.

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Let me prove my point, I could write five hundred words and use all the upvote bots to get my post to enter the trending page, it does not mean my content is the best, it simply means I want visibility.

So do not see the trending page as the home of the best, see it as a place where visibility thrives.

Watch out for more...

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You can follow me on twitter by clicking the icon

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Thanks to @camzy/ @samstickkz and @elyaque for the animated art and badge

Support @curie, @ausbitbank, @teamsteem, @xeldal, @steemgigs for witness

Images are from pixabay

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