What a great and thorough article. When I first joined the community, I was like hey post whatever you have and my starting posts are the evidence. When I didn't got votes on my craps, I felt like hey, steem is dying. As time passed, I learnt lots of new things. It is not that I'm not matured enough. But it is just the trending page which made me greedy. Sometimes I notice silly posts on trending page but it all depends on what whales actually like themselves, so I have nothing to complain. You included all the great tips. One of my favorite: "Write what interests you". It is something on which I was caught. I didn't write my favorite topics. But when I started writing my favorite topics, i started to see improvements in my post votes. See two of my posts below:

https://steemit.com/steem/@princewahaj/steem-btc-technical-and-fundamental-analysis-in-detail-by-professional-forex-trader-steem-gonna-recover-graphical-charts

and this one: https://steemit.com/steemit/@princewahaj/the-likes-and-dislikes-of-whales-explained-3-best-strategies-to-make-trending-post-top-secrets-of-success-in-steemit

I am improving day by day on SteemIt and that's a good thing. Keep your further posts coming because seems like you know all the tricks and follow your own advises too, and this post is the evidence.