To all the successful whales and dolphins out there, how did you succeed on Steemit?

A question to all the successful Steemit users out there: How did you do it? Hard work? Bots? Both? I see such a difference between users that have been here for the same amount of time: some people have built up a following and earn good money on each post while others still earn only cents for their posts, why is that? A whale wrote the other day that you can never succeed on Steemit without the help of bots but I just found a writer who advocate hard work over bots and he earns good money!

So give me of your experience! What did you do? Did you buy votes? Did you post 4 times a day until you got enough followers? Were you somehow lucky? Do you have a whale as a friend?