My Steem Super Stars: Interview with @sircork Part 2

@sircork Talks Steem Sense....

Part 2: @sircork's Steem Secrets to Success

@hopehuggs: What's the one thing that you wished you knew at the beginning of your steemit journey?

@sircork: Slow down and smell the roses. I think that the main thing you have to remember when you come to this community is you don't know where you are. You've just been dropped off in a foreign city, in one of those countries I'm visiting, and you don't speak the language.

There's probably a hundred buzz words related to steem, steemit and busy.org and changebb and zappl and all these things that you will be getting on alert. It's overwhelming. Steem and SBD, steem backed dollars, steem power, vote power, voting, witnesses, words that you've never heard used in this context before.

So, first off, slow your roll. Look around. Learn the lingo. Read the posts. Watch the videos. Figure out what's going on here, because money is at stake. So, it's not just Facebook and happy go lucky pictures of your kids' soccer game.

Pictures of your kid's soccer game here come with a story compelling enough to make people cry and they get paid for writing it. It's not as simple as that, but in general, because there's money involved, things are just a little different than they are in all the other social networks. Come in look around, figure out where you are.

Don't treat this like Facebook. That's the one thing you should know coming in. I came in and I was posting junk and people didn't like it. And they don't like it when you post garbage. They want quality content, that's what they call it. Its kind of subjective, but in general, it just means not posting a picture with no words and no explanation and a nothing.

At least tell us what the picture is up. You know. And because of that, you come in and with some Facebook tendencies, posting memes and things and they don't really work. Yea, its kind of frustrating. So, the trick is to look around and see what is working. Learn where you are and slow your roll, when you first get here. There's plenty of time ahead to get those epic posts out and make some serious money.

@hopehuggs: What three pieces of advice would you give a newbie steemian just starting out?

@sircork: Well, aside from figuring out where you are, there's this adage that we used to teach in one of the largest communities in the whole ecosystem that I was senior leadership in for a while.

And, in that community, we taught people to comment on other people's posts as a young user. To post lengthy, or not lengthy necessarily, but quality content and interesting posts, or good artwork, or great music, or whatever it is that you create, photography, whatever, knitting, whatever you might make and take pictures of and put on your blog, you should comment and build relationships first.

Once you've started to build some relationships to have a following and people you follow, you should begin to create content. Once you have kind of gotten to a point where you're mastering content, people are reading you, you're picking up followers organically from your content and the network of friends, of friends, friends who come to see your things on their friend's recommendation.

Then you become a much more powerful user and at that point, you should start to support the other users around you by liking and sharing, which we call upvoting and resteeming their work, by commenting on their work, by drawing attention to their work in your own posts.

Its acceptable and I did it this morning. To take someone else's post and write about it, and say, "I really enjoyed reading this other user's post. Here's a full link to it. Here's what I liked about it. I wanted to do more than leave a comment, I wanted to share this post with the rest of you and here's why in my own additional original thoughts"

So I wrote a post about another users post, which was well received by everyone because not everyone would have seen it otherwise. So, as a larger user, it's partially my responsibility to grow the younger users so that they will in turn grow more users. The platform will grow and spread, become more widely well known and it's good for everyone to grow everyone.

And one of the things I love most about steem and the environment is most people get it. So, the concept of help your neighbor instead of being snarky and insulting and trolling him, is beneficial to all of us to get more people to come.

And the more people that come and start to exchange this currency and these communications and these friendships and these bonds and these communities and all the wealth benefits that are here. It spreads, and that's our goal.

So, make friends. Make good content. Help the younger users. Do that in proportion to your size as your account grows in stature and reputation and financial status.

@hopehuggs: Are there any tools or apps that make your life on steemit easier?

@sircork: Thousands. One of the things about ... well maybe not thousands. Let me qualify that statement. So, one of the things about the block chain's nature is that anyone can make tools to attach to it, that talk to it.

So, the blockchain's a database follow all the information that is exchanged on this system, whether its financial transactions or post or comments. And all the things that happen get stored in this database and it's called the blockchain. It's a ledger of the finances and all the things that happen with the steem crypto world. So, the tools that people make, anyone can make.

I could make tools that enable you to do something or see a report about say your finances in another way or a chart no one else has made yet and attach it to the system and make it available, either for free or for subscription or whatever model like any website. So, as a result of it being open in that way, hundreds of people have already created great tools that give you, like I said, great analysis on your post.

What's the best time of day to post? There's a tool for that, that looks at user activity across the system. What's the best kind of picture to use or picture size do I make my header on my blog portfolio page? There's a tool for making headers.

There's a tool for almost every kind of thing you would do on any social network. For example, there's a site called d ... now it's escaping me ... It is dtube.video. And that like youtube only its connected to our blockchain, so here when people upvote your video or like your video, you can get paid.

@hopehuggs: Sorry. I think it's d.tube.

@sircork: Yeah, okay. So it's d.tube. I'm sorry for not getting that. You are right. Perhaps we can fix that in the message you had with this. But, the idea is that not so much that one website ... The point is there are hundreds of websites that emulate photo storage or video storage or audio storage like, you know, so you could attach it to your blog and post it and get paid for sharing this content.

You can get paid at these sites, you can use these sites just as you use the more familiar brand names. They're all connected to the same system. So, there are dozens of tools that actually rely on ... One that I like, to throw a shout out to, is steem.center, which is a wiki that users can use to find documentation about all of these buzz words and websites and tools and systems.

Because it's a lot to digest and they do a fine job or providing a publicly vetted system for making help facts and documents about all of this. So, steem.center wiki. Steem.center is the address.

@hopehuggs: Just making a quick note of that one....

@sircork: Yep. It's a good one. And they'll pay you to contribute there too. So if you, well they, again that's relative and hopefully, you explain how payment works somewhere else if you are ... When it comes done to it, there is money out there to be made in the steem ecosystem by contributing proof of brain.

And for you to understand that is much longer discussion, but just think of it as this: If you have a talent and you could put it on the internet, in a video or a picture, or words, which is about the only way to put something on the internet right, then you can, in fact, get recognition for that in the form of financial reward. And this is the place to do it.

@hopehuggs: You've already mentioned some of your Steemit related projects, do you want to say more about the goals and where you are with those?

@sircork: Well I can tell you that I'm most proud of the charity, of course. @YouAreHOPE Foundation is, I think, the worlds first fully 100% transparent blockchain exclusive humanitarian aid organization, that really crosses borders without nations, so to speak. In other words, it doesn't matter that my Agents of Hope, as we call them, are on the ground in the Philippines or Venezuela or Puerto Rico or Nigeria or Sri Lanka or Ghana.

There's so many countries we've done work in now, and we've done work by actually delivering food to people living on cardboard mats outside of hospitals. In Venezuela, in cities where just economically devastated, they're dying and they're laying on the sidewalk in front of the hospital waiting their turn for care three weeks from now, and they may not make it.

So, our guy there is 18 years old and his father and him will get up on a Saturday morning and make 300 arepas. Arepas are a tortilla, flour, cornmeal type of a ... it's a Latin food that's kind of like a handheld food that you can put cheese or meat inside the bread and sort of ... in America we call them hot pockets. In the U.K. you call them pastees or pasties.

@Hopehuggs: Pasties.

@Sircork: Pasties, I think they're called, and you see them in the shops and they're little meat pie or cheese pie. And so they make something like that in a Latin version and they go deliver it on something like a scooter or out of their pick up truck to the homeless people around the city or to the orphans at one particular orphanage that we've adopted in San Cristobal. We're working on the plumbing in the building, taking hygiene supplies to the kids, like toothbrushes and toothpaste.

We're doing things all over the world. School supplies, seats, food, shoes, clothing, for people that have nothing. I mean nothing in many cases not even parents. So, it's really heartbreaking to see these situations, but it's heartwarming to have found a community willing to band together, and it's going kind of viral, since I launched it in October.

On the network ... and everywhere now. "@YouAreHOPE", "@YouAreHOPE Foundation", "supporting the @YouAreHOPE Foundation", "we're fundraising for the "@YouAreHOPE Foundation." We're not millions and million deep yet but, 10 and 100 at a time, we're touching 10 and 100 lives at a time.

So, steem has facilitated that exclusively and it just happened to me, it was an accident, through a series of events that were sort of giving related and helping users, helping users that led me to sit there one day and realize what we had accomplished helping one user with like 10 steem, which at the time was the equivalent of about 20 U.S. dollars.

It's much more now. And when we realize what we could do with such small amounts of money to change the lives of others on this big ole wet dirty green muddy rock we live on together. It really smacked me in the forehead.

So yeah project wise I'm most proud of the charity. From a sheer hard work point of view, the steam star network and the station I was formally responsible for creating MSP Waves over at MSP PAL. When I built those two radio station, that was the 24 to 36 hours a day awake without sleeping trying to get the technology to work.

But now on Steem Star Network, we steam to YouTube, and Twitch, and we post on Dtube, and we post live on our blogs, or not live, but replays on our blogs of the live shows.

So you can actually see the shows live, participate in them, listen to them on replays on the 24/7 streaming stations. Catch them in our blogs. See them on the other watching connected video sites. And that's been a tremendous amount of work and then hiring, or not hiring, but finding volunteer show hosts to meet the 2 hour to 4 hour live shows each week and be there every week and show up

It's been real work. The charity's been a labor of love. The radio station, streaming station, video stations have been sheer labor.

Those are the two things that I do. And of course I mentioned being a witness, which is a project in and of itself, but that more of a solo endeavor and not as time consuming.

@hopehuggs: I was talking to another person earlier who said that in the U.K. we have £7.50 an hour for a minimum wage, but in Venezuela, that's a month's wages worth.

@sircork: So, Venezuela is just economically destroyed right now and there are some little eye opening statistics I'll take advantage of this venue to expose, because even though this discussion may be expired a year from now, in terms of the information in it with the growth of the internet, the changes to come, but Venezuela will still be in trouble a year from now because they're in real trouble now. Right now their economy is so crashed that there's no paper fiat currency available for anyone.

Crytocurrencies are saving the day right now on a number of fronts and steem is at a forefront of that with the @YouAreHOPE Foundation, in my opinion, because what we're doing is we're able to transfer the cryptocurrency through to the people on the ground there who are able to retrieve it and exchange it locally and it is a bit of a grey market when they get offline because now they're gonna buy paper cash from people who have hoarded paper cash in Venezuela before the banks stopped issuing it.

Today, every ATM machine in Venezuela is empty. Today, if you go to a bank, you will wait in 4 hour lines to get 15,000 of their basic units of money, I believe they're called, they're not pesos, they are, starts with a "b". Shoot. I can't think of the money in Venezuela right now. However, you can only get 15,000 of them out, and that sounds like a lot but, a loaf of bread is 20,000.

So you can wait in line for 4 hours at the bank to get some of your money out. And the only amount paper cash that they will ration to you is less than enough to buy a loaf of bread. So getting food is difficult, diapers and formulas for babies is even worse.

We're doing some work in Venezuela now through an agent in Columbia whose able to resource the diapers and baby formula and acetaminophen aspirin like, baby pain reliever for teething. He's able to get it in Columbia, he's going to drive it over the border into Venezuela to distribute it through family members of his wife.

So, that's the kind of network we have built. People really on the ground getting in their car, driving to deliver the medicine, so to speak. Well actually in this case acetaminophen is a medicine, minor one.

And we're gonna get those things to the people because people in steem donated through our foundation, which is steem based and 100% transparent. They can watch the money all the way through the trip to the photographs and video of the babies drinking the formula on the other end. So, I forgot what the question was, but I'd love to talk about that topic.

@HopeHuggs: Apart from what you've shared already, do you have any extra steem strategies?

@Sircork: So, just keep in mind a couple of things. Keep in mind that most people come into the system through a website called steemit.com. Steemit.com is just one of many, many options you have to interact with a steem blockchain database and community and the cryptocurrency.

You can go to other websites like zappl.com or chainbb.org, I think, or busy.org. These are other methods of posting and blogging and interacting ... zappl being like Twitter in that it's character limited for short posts. Then there's the video sites, the audio sites, and all the other places.

So, whatever your talent is, come jump and jump in. There's something here waiting for you that could lead to some reward. Definitely beneficial and great people. The next thing I think to remember when you get here is that success tip would be don't engage in the negative behavior because there are people here bigger than you account wise and there is damage they can do to your reputation on the system. So, in a way, treat everyone with a smile like you would on the street. You're gonna meet strangers.

You're pleasant to them. You hold the door for them at the grocery store, but you might not necessarily hand that stranger your wallet or the keys to your account until you got to know them. So, just be advised, when you get here.

Like I said earlier in the discussion, slow your roll. Figure out where you are and take thirty days to really start expressing your full self. Hangout. Just be quiet, because there's a lot to take in and a lot you could do wrong early on, but it's hard to undo in terms of building your following, your friends, your reputation, your personality.

The YouAreHOPE and Steem Star Network Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/xBVBYdY

SBD proceedings from this post are going to be donated to @YouAreHOPE

Here is part 1 in case you missed it: My Steem Super Stars: Interview with @sircork Part 1

Tomorrow, in part 3 you'll find out more about witnesses, if you are unsure what witnesses do, well @sircork describes it way better than I could.

Or you could just listen to the audio here to get ahead of the game: Audio interview with @sircork

How to vote for @sircork

https://steemit.com/~witnesses

My Steem Super Stars so far...

@booster916
@bitdollar
@olegw
@valorforfreedom
@nainaztengra
@sircork

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