After publishing and promoting the previous "Day 8" post on "Sleeping Your Way To The Top" I had myself a nice, JUICY, 10-plus hour deep slumber, and have woken SUPER-charged with some new ideas for upcoming posts, as well as the overall direction of this series. I may actually start setting aside one of my non-posting days to have this kind of "power-sleep" on a weekly basis. In addition, the shift to publishing one article every TWO days - as opposed to daily - has freed up some mental space to meditate on new ideas, as well as add some additional curation to help gain some ideas from what other people are doing.

It's All About People

Speaking of "other people", what would Steemit be without "other people"? I mean, it is after all the next level of social media (Social Media 2.0), and all of the content which is produced is done so by people, so it only makes sense that we should spend a good amount of time and energy exploring what other people are doing, connecting with those people who interest us, and drawing inspiration from their activities in order to enhance our overall contribution to the ever-evolving Steemiverse. But like all of the other projects we have on our overwhelmingly large - and constantly expanding - "to do" list, we MUST properly organize and implement this task in accordance with our proper "Steemit Productivity Strategy" in order to attain maximum results from our efforts, while avoiding that dreaded descent into the abyss of "Steemit Stuckness".

Developing Your Head-Hunting Strategy

Luckily, setting an effective task for discovering and connecting with like-minded, interesting people on Steemit is relatively easy. You just need to establish a regular place to find new people, and then a simple protocol for how to evaluate and process their content and profile information, and then how to decide whether or not to connect with them, and if so, to what degree.

One place I personally have had some good luck finding new people to connect with is in Steemit Chat. Since I am ALREADY spending a significant amount of time in the chat rooms posting my articles, and browsing, upvoting and commenting on the content of others, it is the IDEAL venue to streamline my "Steemit tribe-building" efforts into my overall activity on Steemit. As time and energy are limited, it is always best to figure out ways to integrate multiple tasks together so that we can attain more results with less effort.

The Pitfalls Of Over-Following

The main problem with following people is that there is a tendency to OVERDO it. This is ESPECIALLY the case when we are new to the platform. We have people and content coming at us from every direction, and we are quick to follow without any sort of criteria which filters people so that we don't end up turning our "home" tab feed into just another mass of disorganized content. Luckily, we have the option of unfollowing any of these profiles which turn out to be not up to our standards, as we develop a better sense of what those standards are.

What we need, as usual, is an ORGANIZED series of TASKS with which to filter all of the profiles of interesting people we encounter so that we can minimize our follow network to those people who are going to contribute BOTH high quality and CONSISTENT content to our Steemit experience. By doing this we are also enhancing the efficiency of our overall curation efforts as we increase the likelihood of discovering content which most resonates with us whenever we check our "home" tab, which is populated with a stream of posts from the people we follow. In this manner, we also increase the chance that we will earn higher rewards on posts we upvote, comment on, and/or ReSteem, as the overall quality of posts rolling down our "home" tab will tend to be of high quality overall, and include ones which will be more likely to go on to become "big earners" upon payout, of which we get a cut.

Developing An Effective Following Strategy

Let me outline the strategy which works best in my case, with the hope of helping you devise your own strategy appropriate for your situation. After I create new content I begin posting in the Steemit Chat rooms. After doing the initial "chat bomb", where I rapidly post in all of the chat rooms in order to get the post out there, I then begin working through each individual chat room. I scan the various posts in each room with the goal of finding ONE post (and sometimes two or three, if there are some real gems out there on that specific day) which I find especially interesting. It could be a simple photo post, or it could be a shorter text post, or it could even be a longer form one. I then give the post as best of a read as possible, to at least get the overall gist of the content. With the photo, poetry, and shorter form posts it is easy to read the whole post. With longer form ones, I usually read ENOUGH of the post to get the general idea, and then I add the URL to the post to the running list of posts I want to fully read when I have time in the future. I then upvote the post. Finally, since the person who wrote this interesting content is quite potentially an interesting, like-minded person I then click over to their profile page where I proceed to evaluate their profile information and other content.

Separating The Wheat From The Chaff

There is somewhat of an ART to evaluating new profiles. The first thing I want to do is try to get a general sense of who the person is. This is facilitated by the information they provide about themselves in the profile. Some people are better at presenting their uniqueness here than other. First, I like to know where the person is from. I am always interested in consuming content from people in various parts of the world, and gaining some insight from their local perspectives. I've followed people in China, Mexico, Russia, Nigeria, Iceland, Georgia, Venezuela, Morroco, and various other places where I have generally been unlikely to hear from regular, everyday, people. It is great to have their "on the ground" perspective WITHOUT the manipulative filter of the "mainstream media".

The next thing I do is give a general scan of their past posts to get a sense of the uniqueness, quality, and consistency of their regular posting. The first thing I look at is the number of posts they have published. If they have a multitude of posts and ReSteems which are disorganized and erratic - on various unrelated topics, with some very short and low quality ones, it is better to pass them up. On the other hand, a small number of posts is NOT necessarily bad. If it is a relatively NEW member then I look at the QUALITY of the few posts. If they are putting out good quality, and it LOOKS like they will continue to do so, then giving them my follow is also a way of helping them boost their following, and exposure, as they work to build momentum in the beginning phase. Seasoned members who have a low post count tend to NOT be good to follow, since there is a much smaller chance of you ever seeing their few future posts in your "home" feed, and the chance of developing a longer-term relationship with them and their content is minimal.

For the second main criteria I look for people who post on uniquely interesting topics with multiple posts written about different aspects of a specific topic. This indicates that the person is focused, and knowledgeable about a certain field of knowledge, and they will likely provide further valuable information on that topic into the future. For instance, some people provide consistent, quality information on cryptocurrency, health issues, specific sciences, art, etc. By focusing on one topic they are fulfilling a niche and making their follow more valuable than others who post more sporadically on the topic, and in a haphazard manner which is mixed in with other, non-related topics.

Red Flags When Evaluating Profiles

The main "pet peeve" I have is people who post content which has spelling and grammar errors which are GROSSLY severe. I am NOT talking about non-native English speakers who make the common mistakes which persist even though they did a basic spellcheck in their word processing document after writing the post. I am talking about people who have lowercase "i" pronouns in their posts, and whose errors are so frequent and severe that it is a CHORE to read their posts. In my opinion, it is simply not worth the finite amount of time and energy we have available to invest consuming these people's content. There are PLENTY of other people posting on Steemit who have the self-respect - and respect for OTHERS - to use the free tools available to them to make their posts respectably presentable enough to readers to justify and read, and perhaps even a follow.

There are a few other criteria I use in choosing profiles to follow, which I may elaborate on in future posts, but I think this above list is adequate to help you begin to devise and improve your following strategy so as to increase your overall efficiency in building strong connections and relationships with quality people on Steemit, most efficiently discover quality content, and minimize the amount of poorer-quality content you have to sift through in the limited time you have to invest in your daily interaction on Steemit.

Today's Dreaded Homework Task

1. After finding and upvoting FIVE quality posts on Steemit today, evaluate the profile page of the posters, using some/all of the criteria I have laid out above - in addition to any OTHER criteria you may feel helpful.

2. Follow ANY of the profiles which fulfill enough of the above criteria which you deem makes them worthy of a follow.

As always, feel free to share your experience and/or additional ideas in the comments.

Full Steem Ahead...

@transcript-junky