Plankton’s Guide To Steemit: My First Month on Steemit

Hello Steemit,

I’ve officially passed the 1-month mark since my first #introduceyourself post and what a journey it has been. When I first discovered Steemit I was hesitant to start blogging as I felt like I needed to learn so much before I could actually start. So, I spent a couple of weeks just reading posts and learning about Steemit. I felt overwhelmed by everything that could be done on this platform (in a good way), so if you are new and reading this and you are in the same boat as me, my first piece of advice is to just start.

Don’t hesitate and just start. I have learnt so much more by just blogging and jumping right in. That being said, I am still learning so much every day and am still a Plankton, albeit a month-old Plankton. What is a plankton? We are the newbies of the newbies of Steemit and will hopefully flourish and grow to become a Minnow, with the ultimate goal of becoming a Dolphin or a Whale.

Read my full #introduceyourself post here

This is a short summary of the information and tools that helped me during my first month on Steemit. I convinced my sister @tingyo to join Steemit as well and found myself relaying everything I learnt to her about how to use the platform and how to grow her account as a Plankton, so I decided to put everything into writing and share it for any other newbies that could benefit from this information.

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Read the FAQ

This may sound like a stupid tip but it has all the information you need to know to understand Steemit. I know it is very long and does get a bit complicated for a newbie but it is well worth the read. I read it twice when I first discovered Steemit and still find myself referring to it quite often to re-read certain parts of it.

Read it here. Read it here. Read it here. Read it here.

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Invest in Steemit

If you have the spare funds and you really believe in this platform you should definitely invest in Steemit and power up to Steem Power (SP). It is a long-term investment but if you are in this for the long-run, getting some SP into your account will give you more power and influence in terms of voting. I personally was only able to invest a small amount and power up to 50 SP but I found that even this investment greatly helped me when I started.

Not financial advice, just my personal opinion, do your own research and only invest what you can afford to possibly lose

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Mindset – Patience Is A Virtue

As a small fish it will take time, patience and perseverance to grow your account and following on Steemit. Especially if you don’t have the ability to invest in the platform to kick-start your account. You will likely see little to no rewards for your content until you grow your following. So as a newbie, a major focus will be to start connecting with other Steemians.

Set yourself some goals with a deadline to give yourself motivation and milestones to work toward. My first goal was to reach a Reputation Score of 40 by my first month, which I managed to achieve just before my deadline. Celebrate your achievements when you can, even if they are small goals, as this will give you that winning successful mindset, motivation to persevere and just because it will make you feel good! It is also wonderful to share your success with Steemit, as I found that reading other’s success stories was a huge motivator on what I can hope to achieve as well.

My long-term goal is to continuously focus on producing quality content and not-so-much on the monetary gains. Although it is super exciting when you receive your rewards, if you primarily focus on quality and interacting with the Steemit community, I believe that the money will automatically follow. If you simply focus on the money rewards and you don’t receive as much as you expected, you are setting yourself up for disappointment, which will just discourage you.

Mindset is so important – so stay strong, be patient, persevere and you will succeed!

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Quality over Quantity

You will read this everywhere but all Steemians appreciate quality over quantity content. My belief is that if you don’t have anything worthwhile to post, then don’t post at all. I don’t like to have my feed flooded with useless posts and prefer to have posts that are well-written, useful and inspiring. I shy away from the spammy posts that have one sentence written with a random picture taken off google that give me no value.

My favourite posts are travel blogs at the moment as they have such beautiful photos that give me ideas for my own travel bucket-list. I also love reading other Steemian’s achievement posts on how far they have come on Steemit. They are very inspiring!

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Learn Basic Markdown Styling

If you are like me and don’t have much tech background, you will need to learn some basic Markdown Styling to make your post look and read well. I am very noob in this regard and have only learnt the bare minimum to make my blogs easy-to-read and understand.

You will find a Markdown Styling Guide on your Steemit Post page. Direct link here for easy reference.

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Be Genuine! Commenting is King!

Be genuine in commenting and replying all your fellow Steemians. I really appreciate and love getting comments on my posts, so I always try to reply each genuine comment that I receive. You can always tell when someone is being genuine or if they are just spamming you with follow for follow and vote for vote comments.

This leads me to my next point of leaving genuine and valuable comments on other Steemian’s posts. I read a great post from @ilyastarar that taught me just HOW important commenting on other posts are. Please read his full post as he explains it all much better than I ever could.

At the end of the day, be real and genuine in all your Steemit interactions and leave those quality comments on posts that you find useful and engaging. This is how the Steemit community grows and is so welcoming and encouraging. Something that is not found on other social media platforms. This community is one of the reasons I LOVE STEEMIT!

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Join Contests!

These are one of my favourite activities on Steemit. I love the idea of Steemians running contests to get other Steemians involved, with the winners being rewarded. As a newbie, this is one of the greatest ways (that I have found at least) of engaging with the community and earning some STEEM or SBD if you win.

There are so many out there but my favourite challenges at the moment are:

• #dailyfoodphotography hosted by @howtostartablog – Rules found here
• Daily Photography Contests hosted by @juliank – Rules found here
• #sevendaybnwchallenge
• Tasty Tuesday, Toss-Up Thursday & Photo Friday hosted by @qurator – Rules found in each of their relevant posts

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Join PAL on Discord – The Minnow Support Project - https://discord.gg/HYj4yvw

You can network with other Steemians through the PAL (Peace Abundance Liberty) Group and can join various Interest Specific or Country Specific groups – for example, I love the Contests, Food & Gaming Interest groups, and I have joined the @teamaustralia group.

The other benefit of joining this discord group is that there is an upvote chat that will allow you to get a free upvote from the @minnowsupport bot on your post every 30 hours. Simply follow the rules and type $upvote (link to your post).

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Resteem your posts

Another free tool to support planktons/newbies/minnows from @resteemable. It’s very simple to use, you just need to replace the https:// in your Steemit URL and replace with “re” and press enter!

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Join Steem Engine & Steem Follower

These are relatively new for me so I haven’t played around with them too much, but they are free to join platforms that allow you to exchange your upvotes & follows with other users of the platforms. The @steemengineteam will also leave you comments.

There are limits on how many upvotes and follows you can issue to others, which helps to promote upvotes & following of quality posts and worthy Steemit accounts only.

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Post via busy.org

This is another avenue to get free upvotes – simply generate and publish your post through busy.org and use the tag ”busy” and @busy.org will upvote your post.

I also love the website interface as you have a "Notifications” system and "Activities" area so you never miss a thing associated with your account. You can filter activities as well to find exactly what you’re looking for. There is also a voting slider to adjust your voting power for ANY user, unlike Steemit, which requires you to have over 500 SP before you can adjust your voting power. Busy.org will also display your current power and vote value so you can easily see your stats.

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Join Qurator – Upvotes for Life

This one is a paid membership of 4 STEEM at the time of writing but I believe it is worth the fee as it enables you to have one daily upvote from @qurator. They feature and curate quality content to generate exposure of it’s members to the Steemit world. They also host three weekly photography contests as mentioned before – Tasty Tuesday, Toss-Up Thursday & Photo Friday

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Use eSteem App on your mobile

I discovered eSteem while reading through another post created by @ilyastarar that explained the availability of an iOS and Android app for Steemit. If you are interested in this app, I highly recommend heading over to read his comprehensive summary of eSteem here.

I love the notifications system, the ability to bookmark posts that you can read at a later time, as well as the ability to create drafts and schedule your posts to publish at a later time and date. The only downside is that the app can be a bit glitchy and slow at times. That being said, I love using this app while I’m out and about and want to read a few blogs when I don’t have my laptop.

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Monitor Your Stats

When I first started Steemit, I had no idea what my voting power was and often went on an upvote spree before I realised that I was down to a very low percentage. There are a few different ways to check your stats.

• Busy.org will show your voting power and vote value
• https://steemnow.com/(yourusername) – Shows your latest upvotes, curation rewards, author rewards and latest post rewards
• http://steemitboard.com/welcome.html - Shows your progress towards Steemit achievements from @steemitboard
• https://steemd.com/(yourusername) – Very comprehensive stats about your whole account, including your Voting Weight, Voting Power, Bandwidth and all activity that relates to your account. I don’t understand most of the information on Steemd but it has a few key pieces of information that are useful to someone like me.

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Post Regularly

This is something that I really need to work on for my own account. I have been trying to find my feet on Steemit but I finally feel like I’m starting to get into a rhythm with posting and reading other’s content around my current life and commitments. So it’s time to practice what I preach, create a plan, stick to it, be patient and persevere.

That’s all from me for now. This was meant to be a short summary but it definitely morphed into something else. My goals to reach by the end of March will be to reach a reputation score of 50. Perhaps I’m reaching a bit far but if I shoot for the stars, perhaps I’ll land on the moon. My daily goal is to upvote 10 quality posts each day and leave as many meaningful comments as I can. I aim to post once every day but at the bare minimum 4 times per week.

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If you made it to the end of this post, thank you very much for reading! I know it was long-winded but I hope you have gained some sort of value from my thoughts and reflection of my first month on Steemit. While I’ve already learnt so much, I realise that I have only scratched the surface. If anyone has any advice, or if there is any information that I have wrongly provided, please let me know!

-Frankie