Hello steemians, it is another good day to be alive and I believe you all are doing great where ever you are. Today, I will be continuing my series of tutorials on how to get started on steemit. This as I usually state in my posts is an initiative to promote the #ghana community and also all newbies across the world on how to make good use of the platform.
This tutorial is going to be in two folds. First, it will be to show you guys how to make a post and secondly how to make the post lovely and attract the attention of readers.

How To Make A Post or A Blog

First and foremost, if you are new to this platform, know that your first post should be about introducing yourself to the steemit community. It should be informative and interesting enough to get people to follow you to here more about the world from your perspective. Now let’s move on to the task for today which is to create a post about something you love or you find fascinating after you have dealt with your introduction post.
On the top right hand side of your profile, is the tab “post” which when clicked, leads to the page where the writing and formatting can be done.

Now as you know the posting page contains three separate tabs and I am going to do my best to explain how all three functions to give a nicely worded blog or post.

The Title Tab

This is the first of three tabs. It is where you place the heading of your blog. Just like every magazine or newspaper, the heading or title of your post must be attractive. The whole point of writing the blog in the first place is to get people to read it and the surest way to accomplish that task is to pick a title that will most definitely captivate the attention of your followers.

The Writing or Posting Area

Here is where all the magic happens. You can go ahead and start typing here but personally I would recommend you use Microsoft Word to write and make all the necessary corrections and when you are done, copy the blog and paste it right here. One thing steemit does that makes it unique is its multiple communities it has. Almost everyone here on the platform belongs to a community and I believe it is nice to once in a while include the name of your community in your blog so show some love and support. Write about the world as you see it here and if you are lucky enough, you will find people who will cherish your work and upvote and even resteem it to promote your blog.

The tags tab

This is where most people not only newbies get confused. It is as important as the blog itself to know how to correctly place your tags. Once you misplace your tags, you deprive your post from getting the reward it deserves. There can be at most five different tags. Each one separated with a space and they all should be in lowercase. Usually, the first tag should be associated to the post you are writing on. Maybe you are writing on how to practice good hygiene. The tag for such a blog could be “health” and of course without the quotes when writing it down. The last tag however should be associated with your community on the steemit platform. As I stated earlier on in this tutorial, everyone here belongs to a community so if you want to make sure your post gets recognition from members in your community, use the last tag for that purpose. It could be “cn” which is china , “kr”which is korea ,”Nigeria” or even “ghana”.
It does not mean you can never use any tag associated with a community you do not belong to. If you have to write a blog about something (say , a recent developmental project being carried out in Nigeria) concerned with other communities, you can use the tags of said communities to get your message across. This type of tag can be placed anywhere within the first and last tag.
The middle tag can be anything but should never be something which is totally unrelated to the post written as well. If you write on matters in life, your first tag could be “life” ,second tag could be “nature” third tag”steemit” and so on.
As you can see in my example, the first tag is directly link to the post “matters in life”. The second and third are also indirectly linked to the post also. Since everything that has to do with life has to do with nature and also I happen to be using the steemit platform to broadcast this message of mine.

Now Let Us Format This Post Using Markdown

There are many formatting techniques one can adapt to make a blog look appealing to reader even before the reading begins. One sure way of making a post look amazing is by using the markdown syntax.

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In this tutorial, I am going make mention of the basic ones and if you want to learn more, you can visit and visit here to do so. Of course you can edit your text by clicking on the editor button which is rightly above the writing area but trust me using markdown down syntax can be fun.
• The first one I will be writing on is how to cite a source.
As you can see right above this sentence there “here” has been made a hyperlink. This technique is used to avoid plagiarism as we all know is one thing the steemit community does not tolerate and here is how it is done.
[Write here](input the link address of the image or video you are posting here which was not done by you.)

• The second is on how to apply bold, italics and even both to a text.
To make a word, sentence or the whole passage appear in italic, you first make one asterisk, write the word or sentence and then put another asterisk at the very end.

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To make a word appear bold, use the same format as the bold but this time double the asterisk on both sides.
To make a text appear both in italic and bold form, follow the same procedure as in making a post bold but this time, make the asterisk three on both ends.

• Making a line and creating sub-headings
To make a line in the blog, simply put down 3 or more asterisks wherever you want the line to be.
To also make sub-headings in your blog, you can do so by starting on a new line by using hashtags followed by a space then your sub-title could follow. You can use as many hashtags as you want but know that the fewer your hashtags, the bigger your sub-title will be.

• Quoting
If you want to quote the words of someone and make those words appear unique in the blog, you can make use of the backquote format. You just start on a new line by beginning with this (>) sign without the brackets followed by a space your message follows and when you done, press enter to end the quote.

• Notifying people on the platform through your post.
During your writing, you can call out the name of any member on the steemit platform by simply typing @username. This immediately notifies the user immediately your blog is created.

These are some of the few basic markdown formats you can adopt to make you post appear lovely to any reader.

As usual, if there is anything I have left out, please do mention it in the comments below to help us all. Thank you for reading.

All images without sources cited are edited screenshots from steemit.com

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