My steemit experience - month 3 update - contests, flagwars, community support and less crypto, more photography.

I joined steemit in April, and on July 06 I will complete 3 months here. June was a month full of ups and downs, excitement followed by dissappointment, followed by gratitude. I think I interacted even more with the steemit community this month, and was able to increase my SP significantly (I am still a red fish, so not that significantly). The steemit learning experience was surely on an uptrend as opposed to crypto or steem prices.

Here is what my bio showed last night at 11:59:59 PM -

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Here is what it was at the end of last month -

Also, here is the post from last month -

https://steemit.com/blog/@karamyog/my-steemit-experience-month-2-update-influence-strategy-upvotes-and-more

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In terms of progress, my progress level increased by 3 levels in June compared to 12 in May. At one point the rep score was -2 due due to 3 massive whale flags. However, the rep score improved eventually, thanks to community support and an upvote from the same whale. Tbh, without these flags and upvotes, i would have probably finished at the same rep score or may be 1 higher but it doesn't matter.

The real benefit from all of this was that my posts about the flagging reached a wider audience and overall support on other posts and the upvote helped balance any loss of payouts. In fact, i ended up with more SP than I would have managed otherwise. And right now, my mantra is simple, convert every steem, and sbd earned into SP. So once a day, I did that will all the daily payouts I received.

I also started following 31 more people and cleaned up my feed quite a lot, removed as many post promoting bots, followed those whose articles were resteemed by people I follow. This month was also about only seeing non promoted quality content on the platform. I also almost reached 400 followers. I am not sure how many people are genuine people versus bots but I do know, or think, about 20 people do read my content, and hopefully find it entertaining or useful, so that is worth all the effort.

Last month, the most useful thing for me was rep score, but i realise that rep score is irrelevant. What matters is stake - SP. So what led to doubling of the SP in a month -

1. I got lucky with one massive upvote from the flagger.

2. Contests - photography contests, in fact, apart from writing about flags and steemit, bulk of my posts this month were about photography. Well actually just photos i had and used it for contests. Then this airdrop channel started by @hatu. He runs daily contests, i had to participate by commenting about different blockchain projects. Please reach out to him if you want to participate. There are plenty of other contests that happen on steemit and it is a fast way to earn sbd/steem and increase your stake.

3. Interact on other posts - this took a hit this month. Even though i made more than 500 posts this month, highest so far, my interactions were limited to the ones i had on my own posts. But i was happy to still be on asher's engagement league, run by @abh12345. You should definitely participate, as it helps you see how well you are doing on steemit.

4. Last, i still want to mention about @theluvbug - the account is there to support new steemians by upvoting and resteeming their content. I also used a service called @dustsweeper. It helps you ensure a payout on the post that earn less than $0.03. Please check them out if your earnings are low and your content does not reach out to many people.

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I am sharing this so that others out there, who are trying to evolve as a blogger on steemit or want this place to be a source of extra income for them can find some of my experience helpful. If you do, then please let me know in comments.

The game is simple, engage engage engage - write good content. And please dont use promoting bots. They are a disgrace to this platform in my opinion.