Building Your SteemIt Audience & Earning SBD
Hey everyone!
I'm just getting started on SteemIt and one of the first things I wanted to know was how to best promote my posts, what to talk about, and the best way to build an audience.
The obvious starting point was to run a quick number crunch on the most popular tags being used on SteemIt right now. Below are my results for the top tags (As of Jan 8, 2017) as well as a super-simple process to find the best tags at any time in the future.
TOP 20 STEEM TAGS BY AVERAGE PAYOUT (SBD)
Average payout
is the best metric of present-day profitability of any tag, but it can be easily skewed by a number of factors. Particularly, whales voting on people they already follow could easily outweigh the votes of hundreds of other people, while not benefiting the average minnow blogger at all.
For those new to the term, a whale is a highly influential person on Steemit because of their voting power. @deeprocks has created a handy list of some of the biggest whales here
Not surprisingly, the whales controlling the majority of the coins are all very interested in cryptocurrency tags, and we see a heavy skew toward crypto content in the top 10.
TOP 20 STEEM TAGS BY AVERAGE COMMENTS
Average comments
is a much more interesting metric. It doesn't necessarily mean more followers, and it doesn't correlate strongly to the average payouts - but I figure it's a safe assumption that in the long term, more post interaction will lead to strong audience growth and better payouts.
As Steem grows as a platform, we can expect many more people joining on who will be less interested in cryptocurrency and more interested in Steem as a social network. These tags with high levels of comment interactions could be early indicators of where Steem will be seeing growth among everyday users in the future.
Run your own number crunch
The values of these tags are going to change over time, and with the rapid evolution of the Steem network I don't see my data being pertinent for long. Here's how to quickly replicate my experiment any time:
- Head to https://steemit.com/tags
- Select all of the table content on this page and copy (Ctrl + C)
- Open a spreadsheet such as Excel or OpenOffice Calc
- Paste the table contents into your sheet (Ctrl + V)
- Add a column for Average Payout (SBD) using the formula =SUBSTITUTE(D3, " SBD", "" )/B3
- Add a column for Average Comments using the formula =SUBSTITUTE(D3, " SBD", "" )/B3
- Copy your formulas to each cell in their respective columns
- Sort by average payout or average comments to get your results
Conclusions
No matter how many predictions I try to make based upon average BSD payout or average comment level, no post is going to do well without engaging content. The most important factor in your Steem post is not your choice of content, nor your choice of tags. It's your enthusiasm for the topic you're writing about, or the utility of the information and data you provide.
Thanks for reading,
-Matt