Earn More from Your Blog with Steemit Crossposting with the WordPress Steem Plugin

Steemit is a quickly growing new social network which allows content creators and curators to earn from contributing to the platform. As one of the first crowdsourced crypto solutions truly paying content creators, Steemit has a possible huge future and could redefine how online publishing, blogging, and even online promotion of other crafts will happen in the future.

At the time of writing the platform boasts an active community and has more than 400,000 accounts. Multiple verticals have been built on the Steem blockchain already, such as dTube, dSound, and also dMania a 9Gag similar platform, as well as busy.org. Steemit itself is also an app built on the Steem blockchain, the everything bucket of Steem content.

The Steem blockchain is host to an active blogging community which may remind the more experienced ones among us of good old school personal blogging back in the day (pre-2005). The Community is very active and many projects exist, both for power users as well as communities curating content and helping new users to be discovered.

How Do You Earn?

Steemit content creators receive 75% of the earnings of each post (and comment) they have published on the platform. Curators, Steemit members who upvote (like) content, share the other 25% among themselves according to when exactly they upvoted a post and their own voting weight (Steemit’s Magic Sauce, a combination of Steem Power and actual vote weight %)

Earnings are in Steem’s own cryptocurrencies and available to be claimed 7 days after publication, or 7 days after posting a comment.

The 75% creator receive are (almost) equally split in Steem Power (STEEM) and Steem Backed Dollar (SBD), both of which hover around USD 1 at the time of writing. Steem Power can be powered down, a process which takes 13 weeks, and converted to SBD.

If the above went whoosh on you, just know that 7 days after posting around 37% of the rewards earned from each post will be available in Steem Dollars and can be converted to a cryptocurrency of your choice, like Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), or Ethereum (ETH) and sold to probably the best understood currency of all… cold, hard U.S. dollars.

So much for the compulsory technical whoosh.

What About My Own WordPress Site?

Steemian @recrypto has developed a WordPress plugin which allows self-hosted WordPress content creators to crosspost their posts to Steemit. The plugin directly posts to the STEEM blockchain and thus your crossposted content will also be available on platforms like the previously mentioned busy.org.

The WordPress Steem plugin is very easy to configure and requires your Steem username and private posting key to publish your content to Steem(it).

WP-Steem settings

WordPress Steem Features

• Automatically converts your post content into Markdown format
• Automatically render WordPress shortcodes to Steem post (Assuming you are using the default WordPress editor NOT the Markdown editor)
• Publish your newly created WordPress post to the Steem blockchain
• Publish your old WordPress post to the Steem blockchain
• Update your published Steem post if you have used this plugin to publish that Steem post
• Set post reward options such as Power Up (100%), Default (50% / 50%), and Decline Payout
• Set custom post permalink for your Steem post
• Set post tags for your Steem post
• Easy to use User Interface

WordPress Steem requires your private posting key to publish to your Steem account. The plugin claims this key is not saved on its servers. While we would appreciate the option to authenticate with Steemconnect instead, we are happy that the plugin doesn’t ask for the active key or owner key. With the private posting key the plugin has posting rights but can not access your wallet.

We especially appreciated the opportunity to set the Steem reward distribution for each post directly in the WordPress editor, as well as the option to enter Steem tags and even the Steem post slug without leaving our WordPress editor.

For those anally retentive who wish to maintain two (slightly) different versions of a post, this can be done by not syncing post publication edits to Steem.

WordPress Steem Revenue Share/Commission

The developer of the WP Steem plugin, @recrypto, has configured the WP-Steem’s sync to receive a 15% reward of each crossposted post to the Steem blockchain, which can be seen on Steem blockchain tools like Steemd.com and SteemDB.com. A commission.

The plugin will automatically get a 15% curation reward from the Steem post created with this plugin for the use of development and maintenance cost with the beneficiary going to @steemful. (This is the brand I created for my projects related to Steem blockchain)

15% May be a price you are willing or not willing to pay for easy crossposting. Depending on the popularity of sites making use of the plugin this is a rather sound business model IMHO [/snark]. Revenue made from the plugin is to further develop the plugin as well as other WordPress Steem plugins by @recrypto.

15% Commission for the WordPress Steem plugin developer

Smart people may now think that they could change the % of the commission fee in the plugin files, but the plugin crossposts/syncs with the Steem blockchain via steemful.com which @recrypto has developed for the WP crosspost service.

WordPress Steem Issues

In our early tests, we found that WordPress Steem’s functionality was blazingly fast and synced immediately with the Steem blockchain. Since recently the cooldown period for posts on the Steem blockchain has been removed, the plugin could also immediately update with edits, even though version 1.0.4 still persists with the 300 seconds cooldown notification. The plugin also dealt rather well with basic use of Markdown. Although you will need the much-dreaded <center> to center align images, but that’s a Steemit limitation itself.

The same 300 second cooldown notification is also shown when a post is saved, without being published, which is also redundant since at that moment no post is published to the Steem blockchain yet.

Another and more important, issue we encountered was a violation of the Jetpack ToS for WordPress.org sites which use Jetpack’s Photon CDN. The plugin posts all images with the returned wp.com image source URL, rather than with the sites uploaded image source URL. This is in violation of the Jetpack Photon Terms and means that until resolved every user needs to change the source URL of each image on Steemit or upload each image to Steem after crossposting. A minor detail but rather big issue. This seems to have been rogue behavior in an earlier test and wasn't reproduced in additional posts.

What we lacked most was an integration, a simple checkbox, to set the canonical URL to the Steemit post. While not everybody may wish to do so, depending on the strength of their own SEO, especially for sites with a weaker domain authority this can be useful in order to avoid duplicate content penalties in Google’s system. The plugin offers no option either to add a footer note about the crosspost.

Like the following one.

This post was written for rockingWP and crossposted to Steemit

WordPress Steem can be downloaded from WordPress.org, the developer can be followed (and rewarded for his work) on Steemit and you should sign up to Steemit too!

Note: Signups to Steem can take anywhere up to 7 days for approval, sometimes even as much as 2 weeks. This is because each new signup is manually approved and funded. If you don’t mind investing some bucks, you can always check out AnonSteem and order an account for a few bucks only. This process is almost instantaneous. Steem account holder can easily create and fund new accounts from within wallets such as the excellent open-source Vessel desktop wallet for Steem.