How to Steem - Part 2 - Create Value!

Welcome to part 2 of my new “How to Steem” mini-series. The goal of this series of posts is to share what I have learned as a relatively new Steemian trying to make it here, and allow my followers to share in the journey with me. If you haven’t read part 1 I would encourage you to do so here: How to Steem - Part 1 - Learn, Learn, Learn!

While part 1 focused on learning, part 2 will focus on doing. The Steem platform is built around rewarding content based on its value, so whenever (or at least most of the time!) I make a post I first think about how much value I am providing to the readers. I’ve definitely noticed a clear and consistent correlation between the value of each of my posts and the rewards they have earned.

Of course, this isn’t always the case. There are definitely a bunch of very popular and/or influential people on SteemIt who could post a picture of a shit they took and get $200 worth of upvotes. 

My advice is to ignore all of that. There will always be situations like that, both on SteemIt and in life, and if you let it bother you or discourage you from trying then you’re losing out. Just focus on providing value to the community and eventually maybe you’ll get to the “$200 shit post” level yourself!

Create Useful Tools or Services

So how do you make posts that create value? My highest rewarded post to date, by far, was when I introduced my bot tracker tool: Introducing the Steem Upvote Bot Tracker. I’m a big user of upvote bots here on SteemIt and I found that it was a real pain figuring out when and how much to bid. I figured others probably had the same difficulty so I made a tool that takes care of all that for you. It created real, clear value for people and that showed in the rewards I got on my post.

Creating a useful tool or service for the community is probably the quickest way to succeed here because they create a lot of value for a lot of people very quickly. Steem is still very, very young and there is a ton of opportunity to build on it and enhance the experience. You might notice if you check the profile of a lot of the whales that they list a number of Steem tools and services that they have created or are involved with. I don’t believe that is a coincidence.

But, I understand that not everyone is a software developer and/or may not have the time and resources to create, host, and run a tool or service. There are still many other ways to add value. 

Post Answers to Your Own Questions

If you read my first post and you’re trying to learn as much as you can about the Steem platform, you’ll probably have a lot of questions...I know I do! Many times clear answers to those questions are hard to find (again because this is all so new), and chances are that if you have a question then there are many others who are wondering the same thing.

This is a great opportunity to add value. Research your question, find out the answer, and then write a post about it. I did exactly that with the post I made last night about how to calculate the value of an upvote. Not surprisingly it was one of my more highly rewarded posts because it created value for people who also wanted to know how that works.

A good way to gauge the value you’re adding for others is the time it took you to research and understand your question. This is the amount of time you’re saving others by posting about it. If you didn’t have to spend much time to find the answer and understand it then it’s probably not worth posting about. On the other hand if you spent hours learning about something that was either hard to understand or hard to find then you’re in a great and unique position to pass that knowledge on.

In fact that’s what this post is right now for me. Everything I’m writing about now are things I’ve learned over many hours of using, reading, and posting on SteemIt over the past two months. My hope is that by posting it all in a (hopefully) clear and organized manner it will be valuable to you by saving you some of the time I spent learning it.

Focus on Popular Topics in the Community

Last, but not least, is that it helps to focus on what the community is interested in. Steem, being a new cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, primarily draws people who are into cryptocurrency and blockchain technology - imagine that!

There is nothing wrong with posting about other, completely unrelated topics, but unless you’re one of the popular “$200 shit post” people I mentioned above, it will be harder to earn rewards that way. If you don’t care about the rewards and want to post about what you love, then that’s awesome, and you will help contribute to the diversity of this site. But this series of posts is about how to increase your following and profit on SteemIt in the most efficient manner possible, and you’ll do that best by posting about what the majority of the community here is interested in.

As a side note - hopefully the release of SMTs will open the door for lots of other communities focused on all sorts of different things to leverage the technology behind Steem. If that happens then you can take the knowledge you’ve gained about achieving success here on SteemIt and apply it in other communities that focus on different topics that you may also be interested in!

Getting Your Content Out There

So great, you’ve read this post and now you go out and build tools, answer questions, and post about everything crypto-related...but you aren’t getting the recognition you deserve for all of the time you’ve spend and the value you’ve provided! The other side of the popular authors getting huge rewards for any crap they post is that lots of newer users with small followings post great content and get next to nothing.

If you feel like that describes you, stay tuned for the next post in this series about promoting your content and getting it the visibility and recognition it deserves!

Thanks for reading, and as always I would love to see some good discussion in the comments. I've recently powered up more Steem and will be happy to upvote good comments!