Really helpful post! One other thing I've noticed is that the time of the day of posting is also really important. I put one post up on 11am, just to test it out, and only accumulated 0.04 Dollar for it. Everything else I post is much higher than that and was all postet around the early evening/night time. That has now become part of my strategy as well, even though I don't understand if it's because more people are online on Steemit at that time in my time zone or just in a different time zone.
Honestly there are so many factors with this that I don't yet understand, but your post helped me a lot! Thank you :)