RE: How I Went From 25 to 60 Rep in Under 3 Months
thank you Brandon. I like how you help people to understand how you increase your popularity. But I get more and more the impression that steemit is so much about money and reputation. The good quality content seems to be rather a vehicle for the goal of big money. It is the same thing without steemit. If you have a business and a website and try to get recognized you pay for google ads etc. Here on Steemit you just pay bots to do the same thing. So basically you invest money in steem power and bots to upvote your content, so people will see your good quality content.
When I see really good content and no votes on it I think something is wrong. In comments I tried to encourage someone. And the articles got much better and with pictures, but still no votes. I don't have too much power yet. So even resteeming didn't help. I think it is really frustrating for people who have to share really interesting things and nobody listens and credits it. Maybe it is because of the used tags. Because if you use just tags that correspond to your article it might not be seen. I think it is sad that you have to use the tags that others are successful with.
Today I stumbled about an article about the future of steemit (sorry, I didn't bookmark it). And later saw an article about the planned Chinese social credit score. Somehow this is exactly what this other article warned about.
Hey @explorer79, that's an interesting viewpoint and I'm sure others have the same concerns or views. I've actually met many people here on Steemit who don't even care about money, following, or reputation. They simply use the site to create blogs that they share with family and friends.. and if somebody else likes it that's great too.
I actually didn't even think about the upvote bots affecting reputation until today. It wasn't my goal to use them in this way but it just came to me. With that said, I've gotten upvotes from some huge accounts here on Steemit that weren't bots, such as @thejohalfiles. These whales have found my posts and decided that they like them. Today is also a great example. @dtube found my video today and gave it a 30% upvote. This didn't require me using upvote bots at all. They found my video prior to any upvotes from bots so it wasn't even in trending or hot. With all that said, I am consistent with my work. So it's really no surprise that over time these accounts will find me. And if they decide the like what I'm doing then they have the opportunity to upvote me. I think this can happen to anyone, no matter the content or reputation they currently have.
But just as with YouTube, Vine (when it was around), FB business page, Twitter, a blog on your own website, etc., you have to put in the work to generate the following, views, Likes, and (with Steemit) reputation. Typically when I see people who are unhappy with Steemit or feel they should have gained more success, they usually aren't posting consistently or they've just gotten started on the platform. It usually has nothing to do with the type of content they're producing, but rather the quality and quantity. What's great is that there are more and more people coming from different niches who are sharing their awesome content here on the platform. This is creating more and more diversity here and will open the doors to more and more people.
And I would recommend that more people should be creating new tags rather than trying to fit their content into one of the more popular ones. We're growing at an exponential rate these days and those who claim a tag/category early on stand to do very well.
Thank you very much for your very long response. I hope you were not offended. It was not my intention to criticize you.
I didn't really start using steemit yet. I only uploaded a few pictures. So I'm still observing how things work here. But I'm planning to do more. But I won't have a consistent topic like you do. I have too many things I'm interested in which I would like to share. But I also know I won't get as many followers if I share a tutorial and later something about politics and another day something about religion etc. and most of it will be in German, because the German community is still pretty small.
I just hope when I'm discussing controversial topics I won't be flagged too much.
No offense taken at all. And you can absolutely write or vlog about different topics. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to zero in on a specific audience then you may want to stick to 3 or 4 topics at most. But it really depends on what you're trying to do on Steemit. There are many people who are very successful who simply vlog about whatever is on their mind. So please don't think that you have to narrow it down. And no, I don't think you'll be flagged for controversial topics. The main reasons people get flagged is for trying to game the system here, plagiarizing, or because they've gotten themselves into a flagging war with somebody lol. I just try and stay away from all of those things. :)
Thanks @brandonfrye for the advice. You're really interacting with your followers. Very good work. :)
Though I am around 200+ days old in Steemit I just became active at the start of 2018. I'm also interested in a lot of things and would like to post them here rather than another platform due to the fact that this platform is decentralized. Good luck. I will follow you and wait for your next great post.
I agree on this. Consistency seems to be the biggest factor. It should not matter if your first ten posts did not have the big upvotes as long as your next post is of great quality, you will catch a whale sooner or later. Using the bots will help as I have learned (and tried) from one of your videos.