A SteemIt Game Plan (That Anyone Can Follow)
I'm obviously very very new to SteemIt. I've been posting every single day and I've been trying to post highly quality content. I've also been spending a ton of time reading other people's posts, commenting, upvoting, resteeming, and testing everything else that goes along with this platform.
On top of that, I've been consuming every article I can find about the platform.
With everything I've been testing, I've been compiling a bit of a game plan to follow, complete with external tools and posting strategies. The only thing I haven't done is put my own money into Steem. I will eventually invest in Steem. However, in the beginning, I'd like to see how far I can take things without spending money out of pocket.
So here's my preliminary game plan (subject to change as I learn more)...
Post a new piece of content every single day. This content should be high-quality and helpful. It should not be quickly thrown together crap, copied and pasted from other sites, or a single image. I will focus on quality content that provides value for its intended reader.
Leave a high-value comment on at least one article that I find valuable. Likely, I'll leave a lot of comments on a lot of articles each day but I'm requiring myself to do at least one each day. Again, these will add to the original article. No "nice post" comments or fluff. If I can't add value, I won't bother commenting.
Upvote a handful of valuable posts each day. If I find it valuable, give it an upvote. At the moment, I'm not too worried about my vote percentage or anything like that. To be honest, I don't totally understand that aspect yet. For now, I'm just focused on being a good, active, SteemIt citizen. If I find value, I'll give it a vote... Voting power be damned. My assumption is that voting power means very little at this early stage for me so I'll just ignore it until it has a much bigger impact.
Use SteemVoter.com - This is a little contradictory to my last comment but I'm testing it anyway. I'm using SteemVoter.com to automatically vote on posts from a handful of my favorite writers. I've set it to upvote new content by 3 of my favorite writers, right around 25 minutes after they post. This is content that I would have upvoted anyway because these 3 people always post high-quality stuff. This automation just helps me upvote it at an optimum time to maximize the power of my upvote. I'm only using it for people that I upvote 99% of their stuff anyway. And I'm only doing it for 3 people because 3 is the max you can do for the free plan of SteemVoter (not investing my own money... yet).
Use the Streamian Curie Guild - With a Streamian account, I can watch for new articles that I think are high quality and SHOULD get a lot of votes on SteemIt. When I find that content, I can share it to the Streamian Curie guild and, if they decide to curate the content that I suggest, they'll pay me 20 SBD. The more I find good content at a really early state, the more SBD I'll earn from Streamian. I can then roll that SBD into Steem Power here and make an even bigger impact with my content and upvotes. It did cost me 0.001 SBD to create the account (less than a penny) but, even for that, I used earned SBD and not out of pocket money. Check out Curie guidelines here. It's kind of a pain to become a curator but, once you do, you can really make some moves.
Watch for UnderSteemed posts once per day - Each day, I'll spend 20 minutes or so over at under_steemed. Specifically, I'm looking for new posts from people who typically get a lot of interaction but have had very little interaction so far. If it meets might criteria above and I find it to be helpful to the community, I'll upvote it and leave a comment. Stuff that I REALLY like, I'll resteem to help with the exposure even more. I've found some hidden gems already with this tool.
Post promotion - Every single time I make a new post on my blog, I'm going to share it as much as possible. I'll start by sharing the article on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Next, I'll use SteemIt chat and post in the relevant promotion section to share my article. Finally, I post it to the SteemIt Bloggers group (in the promotions area) on Discord. Thanks for the tip @thekittygirl!
Bonus Tip: Find writers that you like on SteemIt and look them up on Steemd... Here's my Steemd page: https://steemd.com/@mattw - You can essentially use that site to reverse engineer the actions of others on SteemIt. If you see writers that you really like, that are doing well on SteemIt, check out their Steemd account to see what they've done to get there.
And that's pretty much my game plan.
Once I've proven that I can grow on SteemIt without investing a cent (so that I can show others how), I will start investing my own money into Steem and converting it to Steem Power in order to grow my ability to have an impact on Steem. For now, I'm completely testing without investing anything.
Please let me know if you have any other tips or advice that I'm missing.
The strategy is really to post great content, curate great content, and engage with people in the comments, using great content. Combined with a tiny bit of automation and promotion, I believe I'm putting together a winning formula.
That being said, I DO NOT believe SteemIt is a quick income strategy by any means. It's a long haul strategy and I'm in it for the long haul. I love blogging and writing. This gives me a new outlet and I'm excited about the potential. If you're going to follow a similar strategy, understand that it may take a while to gain traction. Just keep plugging away at it.
Looking forward to your thoughts and additional tips based on experience. :)
Follow me here on SteemIt if you want to get weekly updates on my progress!
If you enjoyed what you read here, don't just 'retweet' it, don't just 'like it' elsewhere. Make sure you sign up and UPVOTE it, here on Steemit and share in the rewards! Also, if you enjoy what I put out, be sure to follow me here on SteemIt as well.
It a mystery why there are so few comments here, this is exactly the kind of posts that should get lots of upvotes and resteems.
In my head my game plan is much like yours but not nearly so well thought out and clearly explained. Not only have read your work carefully, I have copied and pasted to a document I can read and re-read until I get it all in my head.
Thanks
I appreciate it! It's still a mystery to me with what gets the comments and upvotes and what doesn't. :) All I can control is making sure to try to put out content that's well thought out and share it where I can share it. The rest is up to the community. :)
Is there anything else in your strategy that maybe I didn't include here? I'm always looking for more advice and tips!
I have been advised by several steemers to use Discourse. I have finally achieved a working account there and will put more time into it.
I also just asked
https://steemit.com/@ma1neevent
for some help. The response was quick and encouraging.
Are you referring to Discord? I'm not familiar with anyone using the Discourse software.
oops yes Discord
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Looks like a solid plan to me! Happy to have you here with us on Steemit!
Please Reply and I will nominate your post to the @OCD Curator Team!
Absolutely. Thanks so much for that. I've followed @OCD as well! :)
Welcome @mattw. I've yet to use steemvoter, but really need to. I tried to set up voting before, it was buggy and I forgot about it. Time to revisit it.
Matt, happy to see that it looks like your efforts are paying off and you are gaining yourself some supporters. Just keep Steeming, and like I've believe from the first time I came across your blog, you will be big here.
Excellent tips, I've been using a few of these and will incorporate some others. I'm still on the fence on steemvoter, just seems wrong but I can understand your logic there.
This is great advice!! I definitely learned something new here as I've never heard of the Streamian Curie guild! Definitely going to check that out.... so I just figured out who curie is, one of my posts got an upvote from curie and some group voters and it jumped up to almost $10!!!!
I wrote some advice for new Steemians too and since you ask if there's any advice we'd like to add, maybe someone wanting to learn more will find it helpful. There's a lot in the comments section of that article too. It's past the 7 day payout, so I'm not looking for an upvote or anything. :) https://steemit.com/newbie/@snowpea/a-little-advice-from-a-little-fish-to-a-little-fish
Great job!!
Good gameplan! I just wrote about a new List "underrated" that I would love to see on steem it an then I saw in your post that something similar does exist already.
My advice to noobs; Do a great #introduceyourself post, then read and comment exclusively until you have at least a hundred, maybe 200 followers.
If you blog your heart out, and it's upvoted by both the people who read it, you're going to burn out.
Build a congregation before you start preaching, or you're just a guy in an empty hall, talking to himself.
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 :)
I would suggest an alternate game plan anyone can follow. Ignore all Steemit bots, chat rooms, and other Steemit specific tools and functions, and use all that time and energy instead to make the best quality posts you can. And use a fraction of that time and energy and share your posts on other social media platforms that are not Steemit.com itself.
I literally just got done reading this post https://steemit.com/steemit/@kommienezuspadt/quality-vs-quantity-as-a-creative-publisher-on-steemit so it was interesting now to read your post right after. Honestly there is no bad Steemit tips and no one way to go about using this site. I think your tips, while they may not work for me, would definitely work for others.
The best tip, stick around even if something feels like it's not working. Failure is always an option https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/487606750/failure-is-an-option
I actually agree with you on the bots. When it comes to promotion, I have no problem mentioning links in designated promotion areas in various chat apps. I doubt it brings many eyeballs but I'm sure it helps a little. When it comes to bots, I actually don't like them at all. I use the voting app because I feel it can give brand new people like me a little "leg up" and kickstart on the platform but it's interesting because I wish they didn't exist. Bots will ruin SteemIt. This is a platform where the cream should rise to the top, based on the value of the content, not based on how many bots someone uses.
Rule #1 (in my book and my post above) is to post valuable content and to try to be consistent with it. In an ideal world, people will reward consistent quality with their votes. In the real world, it's hard to be seen when you're first starting out and most people will give up when they don't see traction after devoting a lot of time to the platform. Hence, the rise of the bots to help gain initial traction. The problem that follows is that, if the bots created that initial traction, most people won't turn them off once the traction is there. It becomes a perpetual cycle of using bots as a result of greed as opposed to out of necessity to create initial traction.
Anyway... Those are my thoughts on bots. Personally, with only 44 followers and actually having a little bit of initial traction, I'll probably be turning the voting bot off now.