As a noob of one month or so the thing I've found is that there is a relatively short window for posts by a minnow to be discovered, and then the chance is gone. Unless you can devote some STEEM to self-promoting (and I don't know if that has any proven ROI for Minnows) it's like throwing a dice as to whether someone notices it and throws a few $ its way, or it dies in obscurity.

After a week all revenue potential is lost (right?) so no amount of self-promotion like "here is a list of my greatest works" will help accumulate STEEM after that point. That all adds to the ephemeral "now" feeling of Steemit, vs a place to publish long lasting bodies of work that could accumulate you STEEM for weeks, months or years.

I don't know what the logic is behind that, I would guess it is something to do with stopping cheating in some way. perhaps someone can explain.

All this leads me to write articles that are trying to attract a quick hit - salacious click bait titles, images that look interesting and "tabloid" style content. I definitely wouldn't bring a long story, or detailed scientific work to STEEM, it's just not going to get the love from Steemit readers IMO.

Also identifying niche communities who would be interested in your content and upvote is hit and miss IMO. If someone just happens to be browsing a given tag at the right time they may see my article, but the difficulty of finding new content and filtering it from stuff you've seen already makes it unproductive. If I could just go to a take and "mark all read" I might browse to a tag more often. Otherwise I'm at the mercy of my feed and clicking buttons hoping something interesting will show up. I also can't exclude tags from my feed. All these things stop me being an effective curator IMO.