Hello steemians, @drepo15 reporting,

I've been on steemit for 95 days and i'm officially a MINNOW (funny right? I can't help but wonder how long it will take for this status to change). I was introduced by @dreamchasser and we've worked closely together with about 20 other great persons who are all part of our telegram based community of over 900 steemians called @steemitdotcom. Big thanks to @dorth for prompting me to put down this piece.

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We officially launched our airhawk-project few days ago, you can check out of introductory post here to see all we stand for. [link]

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It is for the growth of this community i'm writing this and one thing i must establish first is that steemit is not a get quick rich scheme but a platform that rewards good work. We all started out as minnows, over 500 of us got our accounts registered in just one week but we believed in the power of the community.

One will chase a thousand, two will chase ten thousand

The way steemit is built really portrays this, you need the next man even more than he needs you and I get scared when I imagine what it would have been making this journey as just one minnow on his own.

A lot of posts have been done on steemit giving tips on how to earn on steemit by doing quality posts, we swallowed all this and pushed ourselves beyond our natural ability to do some real good posts but a lot of us were discouraged by the pay outs that came in cents. So we wondered how to really go about this and how to get a whale to notice our quality posts.

How do you really earn?

We wondered and pondered on this, kept digging in and the answer we found is STEEM POWER (SP).

reference

SP is basically the social strata of steemit. And that is what defines a WHALE and I love how @shenanigator defines it.

[link]

How do you increase your steem power?

As already said the more SP you have the better for you, the more you give authors as rewards when you upvote them and the more curation reward you get. This is found in your wallet in case you don't know where to find it.

So your SP increases by

1. Earning
2. Mining
3. Buying
4. Leasing (this is the crux of my discussion)

SP determines the value of your upvote. You can check this out at https://steemnow.com/upvotecalc.html created by @penguinpablo. It's a very good tool in knowing the value of upvotes and without it we'll be groping in the dark and grappling straws.

As at when this screen shot was made 20,000SP will give an upvote worth $2.51 at 100% voting power and weight.

1. Earning

Every new account on steemit is given 25SP on sign up and this is worth 0.01$ upvote. This 0.01$ upvote is shared between the author and curator using this formula

For more on this visit this link.

This SP earned is added to your total SP during payout on day 7 and thats how you grow and earn more SP as you keep authoring posts and curating posts. However this is a very long and tortuous journey to becoming a whale.

2. Mining

You can use your computer to mine some extra SP. This will suffice for this discuss, for more visit this link.

3. Buying Steem power

This is another way to go about this but a very expensive route, however there is no big deal about it if you have enough bitcoins as the SP is yours to keep understanding its a long term investement and I must emphasize the importance of this as we truly believe in the great future of STEEM as a cryptocurrency and steemit.com.
Currently on blocktrades 1.0 BTC = 3538.359SP = 3538.359 STEEM = 4181.539 SBD. So essentially 1.0 STEEM is equivalent to 1.0 SP.

4. Leasing SP

Knowing full well that SP is quite expensive to buy there is a leasing option on steemit for minnows who don't have enough bitcoin to buy. @minnowbooster is a popular leasing service on steemit and the one used by our community. It is a @buildteam project by @thecryptodrive, @cryptomancer and @reggaemuffin. I must say a big thank you to this team because your brainchild is one of the major reasons most of us are still on steemit.
Three months ago on @minnowbooster, 4 STEEM could give you 100 SP per week for 4 weeks, with so much success made and for the love of the community they did a promo with 4 STEEM giving 200 SP per week for 4 weeks. Currently the rate is 4 STEEM for 150 SP per week for 4 weeks.

https://www.minnowbooster.net/lease

@minnowbooster has also gone a step further to encourage communities like ours by giving special rates of 200SP for 4 weeks or more.link

Why lease SP?

1. It is human psychology to give attention to posts that have high payout, quality posts with low payout are not even looked at but when your post is good and has a good payout there are possibilities that a whale will take time to look at it. I stand to be corrected but i've never seen a post below 30$ trending. Now if you can get your post to trend there is no limit to how far it can go.
2. You have a community backing you, this is one thing we've enjoyed in our journey on steemit. I repeat, I don't want to imagine how a single minnow survives on steemit, I sure would have quit a long time ago but for the community i belong to. A group of 20-30 of those who refused to let the dream die decided on the amount of SP to lease and had a schedule for dropping and upvoting each others posts, that way we were able to fully maximize the leasing. After two months leasing SP as individuals and as we grew in steemit and made more friends we knew we couldn't keep to unconditionally upvoting only our posts, we wanted to ensure all other memebers of our community were carried along, free our accounts up and use the SP earned so far to upvote and encourage others, this gave birth to our central account on steemit called @steemitdotcom. We sent steem instead to this account and used it to lease enough SP to cover our schedule and also reach out to other new sign ups especially those with good quality posts with low payouts and those with the introduce yourself tag.

Everyone who sent steem get their reward as author payouts. We had to also move on from here as our @steemitdotcom account was misconstrued as by well meaning steemians who felt we were impersonating the steemi.com admin.
As you already know our new account is @airhawk-project

Mathematics behind Leasing SP

Now lets get down to basic mathematics, this will help you understand why leasing SP is a good plan. I love mathematics because there is no gray line with it, its all black and white. Before I go into it, i'll introduce you to the concept of voting power and weight.

Voting power

Every steemit account has a maximum voting power of 100% and every upvote at 100% voting weight costs 2% voting power.

This can be found on your steemd.com profile e.g. https://steemd.com/@drepo15

Now there is a daily recharge of 20% voting power per day, so u can optimally do at most 10 upvotes at 100% voting weight per day. As your voting power reduces the value of your upvote also reduces. Remember we said earlier that 20,000SP upvote at 100% voting power and 100% voting weight gave 2.51$.

Another example here is 20,000SP upvote at 90% voting power and 100% voting weight giving 2.26$.

Voting weight

This allows you use less than 2% voting power on an upvote if you choose to use a voting weight less than 100% giving you room and opportunity to give more than 10 upvotes with the 20% voting power recharge. It also determines the dollar value of an upvote in line with the % voting weight used. However you can't access this feature until you have at least 500SP.

For example the same 20,000SP upvote at 90% voting power and 50% voting weight gives 1.13$.

MATHEMATICS PROPER

We'll use a case scenario for this. Imagine i want to use 30 STEEM to lease SP. At the current rate on the internal market it will cost me approximately 37.6SBD.

30 STEEM will give me 1125 SP for a 4 week lease on @minnobooster

https://www.minnowbooster.net/lease

1125SP upvote at 100% voting power and 100% voting weight will give 0.14$.

At the rate of 10 upvotes daily for 28 days, i'll get 39.2$

Please refer back to point number 1. (earning) to see how this reward is distributed.

This 39.2$ earned is shared between me, the author (at least 75%) and all curators (at most 25%) as previously stated and this gives me 29.4$.

This 29.4$ is further divided as SBD (50%) and SP (50%). This eventually gives me 14.7SBD and 11.3SP (current rate is 1 SP = 1.3 SBD)
I can do whatever i like with the SBD but the SP is added directly to my already existing SP, giving my upvote more value.

You may wonder why you should go through all of this when you won't break even in the 1st month of lease. I'll refer you to the 1st point I made why you should consider leasing SP. The more value your post has the greater chance it has of trending and with really good quality, a whale may notice it and not just upvote that one post but follow your blog for more upvotes. Most of us have experienced this to varying degrees on our steemit journey and i'll encourage us to drop our testimonies as we comment.

There are other booster services that will help your post trend and attract attention but i'll leave that for another discussion.

Conclusion

With steemit comes the opportunity to blog, earn and have fun. I hope this article is helpful to numerous minnows out there trying to find a foot on steemit. You can start as we started. Do a lease, make quality content and encourage yourselves and I know some day, you'll find your foot too.