Good day to all Steemers!

So the business case for Steem is appealing: where popular web-services like Facebook or Reddit expect you to hand over your valuable content for free, with Steem you actually get a reward for sharing content, provided that this content is valued by the other Steem users. From this basic principle it follows that, if you want to make money on Steem by providing content, you have to figure out what kind of content is considered most valuable by Steemers who hold the majority of the voting power.

Now of course one could try to figure out who those powervoting Steemers are, and what they like, but perhaps that's not necessary. After all, powerful as those individuals may be when it comes to deciding which posts get upvoted, they don't get to stipulate what's valuable content from scratch. What is regarded as quality content is well established outside the Steem community. People have been 'providing content' for millennia, and acquired some pretty good ideas on the characteristics of decent material.

So what are those characteristics? Of course they are not set in stone anywhere, but a quick old Google search should give us some ideas. Let's try 'characteristics of valuable content' for a query.

• Usable: So: readable, understandable, not too complicated, not containing any errors, etc.
• Useful: Of what use is your content to your reader? Is it entertaining? Can your reader learn anything from your article? Do you offer an opinion on some actual topic? Is it stimulating your reader to reconsider some opinion she holds? Etc.
• Desirable: Bla die bla
• Accessible: Bla die bla
• Findable: blabla
• Credible: blla
• Sharable: yolo
• Actionable:: Do you have a call to action? Will users want to take action?  Use your social media marketing campaigns to generate leads before trying to sell anything. Examples: sign-up below, call us now, click to view our portfolio. Speaking of actionable and shareable – please share this article.
• Measurable:  You need to track your social media marketing efforts. Whether you install Google Analytics or use Post Rank to measure your effectiveness, make sure you work with the data.

Ok, so that gives us a start. I got these 'bles' from the first webpage Google hit with the above query, and altered their descriptions, so as not to be plagiarizing. I guess we can add this characteristic to the list: your content has to be original. We may find it strange that this requirement for successful content is not included in the list we found, but criticizing this particular website is not our concern here.

We need a picture! Found one of a cut