How to Steem - Part 3 - Promote Your Posts!

It’s been a little while since my last post in this series, but hopefully that’s given you some time to read and apply the ideas from the first two posts. If you haven’t read them yet, you can find them at the following links:

How to Steem - Part 1 - Learn, Learn, Learn!
How to Steem - Part 2 - Create Value!

Now it’s time for part 3 - promoting your posts. This is probably the most important post in the whole series and - fair warning - it’s going to be a long one! 

At this point you’ve learned all about how Steem works, and you’ve started writing posts that create value for others, but you still don’t have many real followers and you’re only getting a few pennies as rewards for all of your hard work! This post will show you how to promote your posts, grow your following, and start earning STEEM.

Gotta Have Money to Make Money!

To promote your posts, you will need to invest some money up front. I would recommend about $200 but you can make do with less. It is definitely possible to be successful without an upfront investment, but it’s much more difficult and time consuming. If you read this and are thinking “No f***ing way I’m spending $200 on Steem!” please spend a few minutes to read the rest and see if it changes your mind.

Let’s assume you have $200 SBD and want to promote your posts. If you don’t know how to get SBD, don’t worry, we’ll cover that later. For now just assume that you have it. Now each time you make a great post, you can use some of your SBD to promote it. 

On Steem the more rewards a post earns, the more visibility it gets, So it’s a double-win for the author - they get more money AND more visibility at the same time. On all traditional platforms it works the opposite - you have to spend money to get visibility. On Facebook you might spend $100 to advertise your channel/blog/whatever and that money goes to Facebook and in return you get visitors or followers.

The way Steem works is if you spend $100 to advertise your posts, you get a bunch of new followers AND you get more than $100 back in post rewards! This is like if you spent $100 on Facebook to run ads and then after your campaign was done Facebook gave you $120 back! You might think that this sounds ridiculous but this is really how Steem works right now and people do it all the time.

Is This For Real?

I will share the numbers with you on one of my recent posts: Powered Up Into the Top 1,000!

You can see in the numbers above that I spent a total of $17 SBD promoting that post using the paid voting services listed, and in return for that ad spend I got $24.44 back (this is after taking 25% curation rewards into account). That is a direct profit of $7.44 or 43.74%. 

On top of that, due to my ad spend, my post got on the “hot” lists for some of the tags under which it is listed. This increased the visibility of the post, got me some new followers, and garnered a lot of unsolicited votes which has pushed the total post rewards to over $46 at the time of writing.

I made the Steem Bot Tracker tool specifically to help with this process, and have opened it up to all of you to do the same. I’m not going to go into how voting bots work in this post, since it’s already getting quite long, but there’s a lot of information on the bot tracker page and also many of the bots post more details on their blogs which I would suggest reading.

This is NOT an easy way to get free money!

I should take a break here to note that this is only really worth it if you’re serious about growing your brand on Steem and posting good content. It takes time, and work. Without that, you won’t get many new followers or additional votes from your promotion, so at the end of the day it will take a good deal of work for a relatively small return. 

If, however, you’re really trying to grow your brand and gain a following, then the work and time investment will pay off from this method. My first two posts in this series focus on how to post good content (in my experience, and opinion) so make sure you are doing that before starting to invest money in promotion.

Rinse and Repeat

So with an investment of $200 or so SBD, you can make a post every day if you have the time (I wouldn’t suggest much more than that) and spend around $15 promoting each post and expect to make a total of $20 in rewards after accounting for curation. At first you might make a little less but as long as you’re at least around break-even it’s fine - you should still be slowly growing your followers.

Then after 7 days the post will pay out and you can use that to fund the promotion of your future posts. Rinse and repeat. This way you shouldn’t ever have to invest more money and your SP should slowly grow over time. After enough time, once your following grows large enough, you may be able to earn $20+ on your posts without any promotion, and then you’re golden!

I am currently using this exact process and it’s been working very well. It takes time (which is the most difficult part for me with a job and a family) and a lot of work, but if you put in the effort and are smart about it, it will pay off.

All Good Things Must Come to an End

I should also note that this will not last. Any system where you can put in money and get back more than you put in will only work on a small scale, which is what Steem is at now. Once Steem grows, these opportunities will go away. There will still be many options to promote your posts, but they will not be anywhere near as profitable as they are right now. So what I’m trying to say is - get in and take advantage of this great opportunity while you can!

Speaking of “getting in”, I mentioned at the beginning of the post that I would talk about how to actually get some STEEM or SBD. Rather than doing that here, and making a long post even longer, I’ll refer you to this great post by @timcliff which shows step-by-step how to take your fiat currency and turn it into STEEM: [Newbie Guide] How to buy Steem

If you’re thinking that it’s a pain to turn fiat into STEEM - you’re right, it is. One day (hopefully soon) it will be a lot easier. When that day comes the price of STEEM will likely be a lot higher than it is now, and these great promotion opportunities will be gone. So if you take the time and effort to go through the process as it is right now, you’ll get in before everyone else - and that’s a great place to be!

Whew, that was a lot! Thanks for reading. Feel free to ask questions or let me know what you think in the comments!