The Frustrating Experience Of Acquiring A Followership That Is Not A Readership Base In Steemit: The Minnows Dilemma
Overview
Your steemit readership growth will eventually determine your success as a steemit blogger. This is not different from what happens in conventional blogging. Your readership is your traffic in conventional blogging. In steemit, your readership are your potential upvoters and resteemers. Going by this, it then means that any step taken towards growing and maintaining readership of any steemit blog is a sure way of growing the blog.
What is readership?
Simply put, 1 a : the office or position of a reader b : the quality or state of being a reader
2: the mass or a particular group of readers e.g a magazine's readership1
Going by the above definition of readership, it is obvious that your readership is not necessarily your followership. This is where the problem of most bloggers in steemit come from especially minnows that are in a hurry to make it. Assuming that all that followed you are necessarily interested in what you blog about is a wrong assumption that has frustrated many.
There are so many ways to grow followership in steemit. Many of these ways are not organic and they end up getting the wrong followership. When you travel to steemit.chat and meet mostly minnows asking for follow for follow or engaging in other means of acquiring followership that is inorganic, you will understand the craze for followership.
Unfortunately, what these group of followership hunters do not know is that it makes no sense acquiring a followership that will just come and occupy space without actually adding any value to your blog.
Why so?
The reason is not far fetched. When you go to a place like steemit.chat or discord and beg people with different interest to add you, you end up getting people who are not interested in what you are interested in. They did not add you because they read your article and was pleased and therefore didn't want to miss another edition. They added you because they responded to a gesture of adding for adding or a plea for them to add you.
Result
When you grow a followership that is not readership, you get more frustrated because you will still be as if you have no followers. When you publish an article, you are not likely to have any of them read it neither are you going to get the expected upvotes and resteems from such followership. An organically acquired followership are more likely to form your readership base!!!
The way Forward
Get followership organically. It may not bring a drastic growth to your followership base but it will likely bring the right people. Let people add you in their own volition after reading your article. If they did, because they loved what you wrote in an article they read, it is more likely that they will like another article from you and are more likely to upvote you or resteem your subsequent posts.
Conclusion
Follow for follow and begging for following does not improve your steemit experience. It pays you to concentrate in writing quality articles that will attract the right followers. Engage them with further articles and good commenting. Make them like you and what you do in steemit. Care for them. This is the only way to get quality followerhsip that will translate to readership.
Did you enjoy this article? Resteem, Upvote and Follow @yourhelper and join amazing readership for more quality articles to come.
Reference
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/readership 1
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Even I made the same mistake when I joined steemit...but now I have decided to improve my work and not to care about trading followership because in the long run it's not going to help me nor my followers...resteemed and upvoted..!!
Indeed there is no way you can grow by adding followership that do not align with your blogging ideology. It is a wasteful venture.
can't agree more
I am surprised how many people do not realize that the value of a follower that does not read your posts is very small. I also wonder how many of those that use the "follow for follow" technique actually read the posts of the people they follow.
Personally, I will upvote an article if I like it and follow an author if I like several their recent posts.
The post for the contest —Say No To Wars And Conflicts Today. Join @yourhelper To Advance This Noble objective
Sorry for bad English=)))))) Or a link to put in the other post?
Yes, you are right. This is the discussion of quality followers. Everyone wants to have a loyal readership, which actually reads and loves what you right.
For sure this is not for free and easy to achieve. Hard work and much more patience are required.
Thank you for your help.
It is heart-warming to know that you enjoyed the article. Thanks
Well, don't know if i got the right followers, but i never asked for follow, i find my followers grows very fast, i also do follow a lot of people because i want to find content on my home feed...
It depends on what you want. I can tell you that it pays to grow the right followers gradually if you can. But if you rushed a lot of people to add you, the churn rate will be high. In any case, you will still get some churning whichever way but the rate is higher when your followers where begged or baited to follow you.
Well, i never begged or asked to follow me, that is for sure... I do see my followers grows quite fast... Probably because i also follow a lot of people...
I concur with what you have stated. But with boom in user base, don't you think it is high time the hot/ trending/ promoted tabs etc. be more customizable?
On an average I see close to 40 steem posts every half a day! I follow only around 200 people. Why should we still rely on services like streemian to ensure we don't miss viewing an article by our favourite author(s)?
I think this state exists because initial design of steemit allowed it so. I hope future updates will alleviate this problem. But with regards to users who bug us every time we log in to steemit.chat, god help us!
You raised some valid points here and I can say that steemit is a going concern. Things can only continue to improve. More hard forks will come with time and there will be more adjustments on the UI design of steemit platform and other things that will make blogging easier. Rome was not built in a day.
Thank you for the post. All true. Upvoted and resteemed. https://steemit.com/love/@hope777/love-and-marriage-23
thank you! it's sometimes difficult not to get caught in the craziness of followership with so many posts speaking about how to get more and more and more followers... we can just start craving so easily.. and we see accounts that were created a month ago with already 300 followers and we ask ourselves what the hell am I doing wrong?? does this platform suit me?? Am I loosing my time?? it's a challenging mind game to stay on course and build readership organically like you say but at the end, so much simpler, as you just follow what your heart wants to read, with whom your heart wants to connect to and reply to, so you're being authentic, and from that place of authenticity, people start to see you for who you truly are, and start to follow you... so interesting... struggle versus ease... I chose ease! thank you again for your post!
Thank you for this valuable tip.