Hi, Welcome to Steemit!

With your travel blog you'll surely find an audience. But I have a question. Michael looks like an old school friend of mine. Pretty much 100% the same with the exception that Jacob was tiny. And Jacob was a Jew. Michael is not Jewish by coincidence as well?

Anyway, here are some tips I give to newbies when I see them:

• Never just copy a text or publish a photo/video without explanation. Always add some text and never forget to add an image to a text.
• Never steal an article and if you quote something or re-publish one of your own articles from somewhere else, always add a link to the source.
• Always use all 5 tags for more visibility. (try #q-filter -> https://steemit.com/@qfilter)
• Here is an interesting site where you can look up the stats for your account and others.
• This is another stats site where you can see your reputation and what to do to climb up the ladder.
• Commenting other posts is very important, it brings you in new readers and followers. Also try the Steemit chat rooms.
• There is even a help site for Steemit where you can find explanations for the site's functionalities
• I wrote a post with an explanation of the most important Steemit vocabulary.
• Behind this link you will find a list with a total of 60 introduction videos for Stemit.
• Someone broke down the Steemit Whitepaper (=the concept for the platform) for normal people
• There is also a very long list with Steemit related projects
• If you want somebody to read your article or follow your conversation, mention their username (don't forget the @).
• Commenting other posts is very important because you get "curation rewards" which means Steem Dollar from the pot for the article as a reward for the interaction.
• Learn the Markdown styles to format your posts (you can find how it works in a link on the right side below the text box)
• A lot of votes on steemit come from bots that you (or others) can pay for a vote. Depending on the bot, you end up with more $$ than you had before.
• All bots work pretty much the same way: You go to your wallet and click on the little arrow next to the Steem Dollar amount. Then click on transfer, fill in the name and the amount and add as memo the URL to the article for which you want an upvote. Very simple.
• For newbies the @earthnation-bot is excellent, it supports only newbies and has very profitable upvotes.
• Overall, I would not recommend to use upvote bots. Here is an article in which I explain why.
• There are also resteem bots, but I don't find them too useful and don't know which one is good.
• Be careful with your password and watch out for scamming attempts. Several big accounts got stolen and now they try to lure others into giving away their password by posting comments with links to fishing sites.
• You have several different passwords. Whenever you have to use a password and it is not stated differently, use the active key and as little as possible your owner key! The latter is the big key to your account and if that is gone, you account is gone.
• Be aware that content that has been saved on the blockchain cannot be removed again and every user can see how much $$ you have! Therefore, always be cautious what you publish about yourself and your home. Don't give robbers an invitation to pay you a visit!
• In case of problems with "not enough bandwidth to post, comment or upvote", please contact the help channel of the Steemit chat.
• If you have further questions or experience problems, you can always go to the Steemit Chat for help, or you can ask me.
• Alternatively, you can check out @dobartim and his running a "Steemit School" chat channel on Discord.
• Never underestimate the complexity of the Steemit environment, I'm here now since quite a while and I still learn new stuff.

I will follow you now. (<- always add that to a comment when you intend to follow the person who wrote the article. This way, you increase the likelihood that they follow you as well.)