Getting To Know Steemit - By Commenting on it

In this post I want to call out to people who are new or want to join steemit. I am not going to be sharing any technical details about the platform but in this post I would like provide a reason for people to join steemit. Better yet I would like to give a reason to the new people who are on steemit to stay on steemit.

I joined the platform in January 2018 with this naive idea of going big time on steemit. The ingredients were already there - You post and you earn, you comment and you earn. Hell even if you upvote somebody else, you still earn curation rewards.

This was me a few months ago:

What I actually thought was all true but with a minor difference. I realized that if I want make something of myself here then I needed to stop thinking like an individual but start to think in terms of how we can grow as a group. I would get back to this point later but I can't impress enough on you how important it is to actively participate on the platform, rather than being a solitary blogger who just posts and does not interact.

So you have an account on steemit now. If you check your wallet then you would notice that some steem power (SP) has already been delegated to you for free! This way you don't have to start with a zero balance. So how do you work on steemit? Lets break it down a little:

1. You post or comment
2. You may or may not receive an upvote from fellow steemians
3. If you get upvoted then you are rewarded with Steem or Steem Dollars (SBD)
4. These rewards are automatically sent to your wallet after a week where you can collect them
5. You can choose to convert your steem and SBD to steem power in a process called powering up.
6. The more you power up the more is the value of your upvote.
7. Next order in things would be to join some communities on steemit and be a part of something worthwhile (I am a part of #steemsilvergold - a group that shares a passion for bullion). This way you contribute to a groups cause and earn their support, all the while getting to enjoy the group activities :-)
8. Participate in contests. A few days ago I came across 'Pay It Forward Curation Contest' and it is a very nice way to bring more people and earning to your blog posts and at the same time become the reason to bring the same steemy goodness to somebody else's posts as well.

The above points are just a little bit of ground work that you already know by now and I just put them here because the post felt oddly incomplete without the logistics. There is far more better information available on this on other blogs. My main purpose here is to write something of use to you here. Something that can make you grow on steemit.

For a newbie like me, that something is 'Writing Meaningful Comments' for the posts that you read.

Follow people you like to hear from and read their posts and I mean truly try to understand what they are trying to tell you. Once you understand that and give them a meaningful reply in form of a comment, I can practically guarantee you that they would upvote you. Why wouldn't they? You heard them, you heard what they were trying to tell you (that's why they wrote the post in first place - to share it with you). They will appreciate that took the time to listen to them and would upvote you based on how good the found your feedback.

Remember that for newbies on steemit it is difficult to get visibility. sometimes your posts may not get any upvotes not beacuse they were not good but because nobody saw them. So the idea of commenting for newbies is that when nobody is coming to you then you go to them.

Oh and remember that before you start commenting, you have some decent posts made. Once people see and like you comment they might upvote it but they also might want to visit your blog. If you have no decent posts on your blog your credibility goes down, hell you start looking like a bot.

Comments are the proverbial grease that makes this system run. So we need to get out there and leave some comments that would let people know that you are worth their upvotes.