My First Month of Posting on Steemit

My account was active for a week before I made my first post. As usual, I needed to poke around with a sharp stick for a little bit prior to jumping in. Then I made my first post, a short photo blog about a recent family trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It launched me into the Steemit universe with a whimper. A total of three upvotes and one whole penny, which got wiped out at the end of seven days.

After just spending four months banging my head against the red and white wall that is Youtube, I wasn't going to let the mediocre performance of my first post deter me. Slowly I started getting more upvotes. Then I found some of the many photography contests and started participating.




Making Strides as a Newbie

My understanding of Steemit grew a little with each post. Reading some good posts under the steemit tag helped. Then Steemitboard posted a comment about achieving something and that is how I found a useful way for tracking my progress. At some point I saw a mention of steemnow. That site is a must have for checking out your latest information on upvotes, pending payouts, vote power, and more.

Then I published one of my short stories and It made around $25SBD. Okay now I'm excited. I made the mistake, at least in my opinion, of converting it all to steem power immediately. That's okay though because I'd had my first successful post. After that I finished in the paying 6 in the Monomad photo contest, wrote a post about the tag system on Steemit, and posted some more photo blogs that met with varying degrees of success.




My first Winner, Winner Chicken Dinner of a Post

First, lets mention that I was starting to figuring out how things worked. I began to learn about the bot services available but wasn't able to use them because I had been converting all my rewards to Steem Power. Just prior to my next short story being posted I switched to the 50/50 payout setting.

That was some fortuitous timing. I posted the story and took a mid day nap. When I woke up it had 50 something upvotes and a reward of over $70SBD. For the next three days I watch that climb to $110SBD and just short of 100upvotes. At the end of it's seven day run it paid out $115SBD total. Okay, now I was hook.




Cruising Along and Playing the Game

Now I had some SBD, 43 of them to be exact, to play with and I went to town. I was posting at about a clip of 4 a day on most days and 3 or 2 on my “slow” days. I started trying out the different upvote/resteem bots. I sampled a lot of them and I'm still discovering more. I did this with an eye toward ROI and learned how to work them for gains. I'll be sharing what I found in an upcoming post.

I'm also amazed at the speed I've gained followers. In four months on Youtube that endeavor gained 60 followers. I also started a facebook page to support the youtube page and that actually did better, gaining 102 followers in the same four month period. During my first month of Steemit I gained 168 followers. Yeah, I think I'm staying right here.

Then there is the matter of money. Youtube doesn't monetize till you've gotten 10,000 views. I'm at something like 8,000 so I haven't made a penny. Facebook doesn't monetize at all so there will never be any direct earnings. Steemit has been a different story. In my first month, based on this morning's Steem and SBD values of $1.28 and $0.91 with a pending payout of $48 SBD over the next week, my minimum account value at the moment is $132.62 USD. Not exactly enough to retire on but compared to how hard it is to earn on other sites it's fantastic.




What do I See Down the Line?

First off, I'm wildly bullish on the long term prospects for both Steemit the site and Steem the currency. With the addition of communities, a mobile app, and easier on-boarding of new accounts in the next hard fork I think the number of active users will grow. As the inflation of the currency begins to decline and the site grows in popularity the value of the steem we are earning today with skyrocket. Maybe one day rivaling the big boys like Ethereum and Bitcoin.

As for me and posting? Over the last week I've aimed at making 4 quality posts per day for a week. That schedule has forced me to rely more on short storytelling single photo posts. I'm going to switch modes now and concentrate on high quality posts rather than an arbitrary number of them. I'm going to continue to participate in the Steemit photo challenge, the B&W photo contest, and the Monomad photo challenge so right their I'll still be making up to 11 posts a week for those.

Along with the photo contests, my aim moving forward will be to write one or more articles about Steemit every week. This article obviously falls under this category and I have plans to write two more this week. One on how to use the bot services for ROI and one on how to use them to get your post on the hot list. I also want to share the photography knowledge I've gained over the years and will be making one or more posts of that nature every week. For this week I plan on one explaining the different sensor sizes of cameras and one explaining how focal lengths of lenses work. Last, I want to post at least one short story a week. Of course there may be a photo blog or two, but I really want to end the single photo blogs and only produce multi photo ones. In the end I want the number of posts I make to be an organic function of producing content I want to make and think the community with find of worth rather than an arbitrary number.

Thanks for reading my post. Now I'm off to check the themes for the photography contests this week.

#ocd-resteem