Minnow Tip: The Simple CURE to Your Upvote Shortage
Newcomers to Steemit and people I onboard in the Israeli community often ask me how they can be successful and see positive ROI on their time investment in the platform. I've also gotten the same questions from numerous minnows who've been trying to get their payouts to rise above $0.10 for months without much success.
My answer is always the same, and in English it's even easier to remember:
Use the C.U.R.E.
Create
Create good content, prioritizing quality over quantity. If you don't have anything insightful to post, just don't post. It might sound obvious, but newcomers who are not familiar with Steemit often litter their account with testing shitposts and treat the platform the way they treat their Facebook feed.
Producing good content entails typing a lot into a single post. Or clicking the camera a bunch, or talking to it. Copy-pasting, typing up 3 sentences and adding a meme is not very likely to bring followers or significant upvotes.
If you're looking for tips on writing readable Steemit posts and creating better content, I got you covered.
Upvote
Looking at your $0.01 upvote contribution does not encourage curation. Your miniscule curation rewards depend highly on your vote timing and even then - are they really worth the work? The answer is yes.
Curation isn't only about getting those SP fractions from the payout on a post. It's about attracting author attention and showing appreciation. In addition, upvotes must accompany those very important insightful replies you write.
Reply
Unlike traditional social media platforms, Steemit.com is not really designed for personal interaction between users. So as it is today, your primary communication tool on the blockchain is the little "Reply" link on the bottom.
I recommend leaving at least 20 insightful comments for every post published. And I am not talking about your generic "nice post" spam comments. Leave meaningful replies that create discussion on trending posts in tag where you have something to contribute.
Remember - replies and upvotes are rewarded similarly to posts, so investing in a GOOD comment on a post by someone with 3,000 followers will get more eyes on your profile than a post you publish to your little following.
Yes, comment first, put out fire later.
Engage
What some people seem to miss about earning money on the Steem blockchain is that it's not the blockchain that pays you. It's other users just like you voting on the distribution of the daily reward pool. So it's the people who "pay" you, and you need to engage them. It's not about pasting links to your posts wherever you can without being banned. It's about joining communities, chatting on steemit.chat and Discord and also bringing your friends to the platform as mutual support goes far beyond the value of upvotes.
-=-=-
At our own incubation pool called @steemitfamilyph whenever new folks ask me how to get many upvotes I tell them what you summarized here.
Create good Content, Upvote on others good content, Reply and comment with insights that further the discussion and Engage your followers and don't leave them hanging.
Unfortunately a lot of new people are churning our 3-5 different color challenges, selfie challenges, memes and 2-3 liner posts and complain when they don't get upvoted. We are trying to teach them to focus on quality and not quantity.
I have dialed down from 2-3 posts a day to one, to my standards, good quality post and it is rather disheartening if it does not do well but hey its a hit or miss with me at times haha.
One thing I never do without is dropping by other people's post and making a good comment. The aim is not to just seek for upvotes but to make a lasting impression to make curious enough to look at what I write.
I'm not the most talented person out there, I don't write well enough nor can draw to save my life but what I do well is engage. According to Steem.supply I do an average of 11 unique comments outside of the replies in my post. I make 11 impressions out there to make people be curious and in fact 40% of my earnings comes from upvotes on my comment.
So when I tell new folks we are mentoring that my secret sauce is creating good content and engaging people I often hear that it is hard. Everything that matters is hard and takes either working hard or working smart. I try to work hard and smart and give authentic human connections.
Great thoughts this will be shared with my team.
According to steem.supply I've dropped to 10 comments a day. Need to practice what I preach and up my game.
Role reversal!
*takes your whip and slaps you with it
Go and make more comments haha!
LOL
Yes sir!
wow! Between you 2 this is the most valuable information I have seen about steemit ever! I have started to follow you as well, @maverickinvictus. Thanks for introducing steem.supply as well.
If you found steem.supply useful wait till you use Steem SQL to be able to filter whatever data you want haha
The few friends I brought in left quickly, and now talk smack about the place on other social media. My connections are mostly content creators and the high price of entry (to get sp) and difficulty in finding an audience here are daunting.
I still mostly enter challenges for this reason. I slip my message in where I can, but few authors are willing to do this type of work. They only want to talk about their message. Weight loss coaching is one of my niches and I have only found a handful I think could do this work and they are not interested.
I find a better result by working with people that are already here and trying. If I can help them when they are tiny, I think that is the best place for my attention. We have such a high minnow death rate - I don't think I need to be recruiting if I can save someone who is here now.
I have not gone in chats. I upvote good comments I get on my posts and seems to be doing pretty well with engagement out here. I don't have anymore time to chat than that.
I 100% agree with making comments on other people's posts. I try to make 30+ a day but rarely do. When I make a lot of comments it really helps my rewards and that's also how I meet people here.
I totally agree with everything you've said here. I would love to engage with more people like you, unfortunately, I don't really want to be a part of diet culture so it might just be a content clash sometimes too.
get your bike over to Asia :-)
To be honest that is my dream!
I agree with you on the chats. I just don't see how I could fit them in! I can't keep up with all the stuff that I genuinely want to read on the regular feed.
Well said @fitinfun , hope Thailand is still treating you well !! I Won't be back till mid Feb :-(
Good advice but also I think we don't live in a perfect world, so all good content and meaningful comments might still not get me to where I make more than a few bucks per post whereas when my whale friends vote on my posts despite its quality I can cash in a few hundreds per day. That's just the way it is. In this game the people who came in early have a major advantage. So I personally are on here for fun because I don't make money but I have met some amazing people and communities here.
The question of content or comment first? I personally don't just follow someone who has made a nice comment. I look what kind of stuff he posts because I hate when my feed is full of stuff that is totally boring or irrelevant to me. And also not posting your best work in the beginning? That sounds as if everyone has an archive of prewritten posts sitting there?
I blog whatever happens to come up in my life so I can't decide if there will be better things coming up to blog about or not. Who knows?
Ah. We have the reverse "problem", you and I. Instead of having to create content good enough to attract attention, we invest in making good posts to justify our whale's support and still be able to look at ourselves in the mirror. I totally get it.
I accidentally ran a little experiment. SteemVoter was down, and so was steempty's trail on me. I ran a failed livestream of a Hearthstone game and it was so bad (by my standards) that I didn't even self upvote it. It payed out a couple of days ago.
My results: $60 in payout. $27 out of that was a whale who sometimes upvotes my things manually and I honestly wish it was someone I knew and could speak to, maybe teach him how to set up a trail so he can "use" my curation abilities like steempty does, to earn curation rewards by trailing me.
Second biggest vote is the interesting one. - + dlive 3% ≈ 23.82$. That's not a whale friend, and an upvote ANYONE running a dlive can get. So without my friend whales and with one random whale, I got $60 on a post that I wish I declined rewards on.
Conclusions: if you're after the money, services like dtube, dlive and utopian have their own chubby accounts that will pay you regardless of size or whale friends as long as your content is what they're looking for.
If you're after the engagement - engage. And never stop experimenting. I also had an unreasonable payout on a meme I made on dmania a while back. Most of it was from the dmania account, and I felt ashamed for the shitposting and tempted to create a stealth user for dmania alone so my account doesn't end up a dumpster.
Sure, I can post 10 times a day and be a little heijin all by myself. But what would that give me? What would that contribute to the community? Exactly nothing. I am not greedy. As long as I am making enough to live comfortably, the blockchain will remain my primary source of income. I am not here to rape the reward pool, just create and contribute while still paying the bills.
Uh, oh, the part with the whale friends was more a theoretical statement, sadly no whale ever upvoted me and I don't pay any bills with Steemit. 😊
luv u already lol hehe
You're much more experienced than I am, but for the complete newbies, I would put the priority of commenting on others' posts even above creating own posts.
P.S. I love the "Yes, comment first, put out fire later" GIF. :D
I somewhat disagree. Having some quality posts for your new followers to discover up on your profile page is important. So I stick by my 20:1 suggested ratio. It includes comments like this one, by the way - replying to a reply on my post.
Yeah this is a tough one right? Should I hold my content that I think is pretty good, for when I have more followers in the future and concentrate on other engagement right now? Perhaps yes if it has legs, but obviously anything that is timely or news based I will want to put up now. I have experience in online journalism so I would have thought that might help, on the other hand before you have much of a following you don't want to do too much in depth pieces here, certainly not at the expense of something you could pitch elsewhere. The balance is hard but interesting so far.
I absolutely agree. I always say that I am still experimenting with steemit. Every week I do at least one new thing to see what happens. :)
I think we should read a lot of other people's posts,
See and understand how things should look.
Gather enough followers before you start posting.
I personally, respond to many posts almost every day
and writes a post (good) once in a week.
You have a lot of followers - You'll have more money
That's the only method I see working
Strangely, or not. The majority of people who wholeheartedly agree with your post are members with huge reputations and plankton out fishing.
I am an admirer of your work and this article is, as all your work is, a fabulous piece of well constructed writing and whilst great information, I think there are one or two points I'd like to raise.
Content first ? I'd absolutely disagree. A new member who comes here full of enthusiasm who immediately publishes an amazing, signature article is immediately going to be cut down by the fact that simply put, barely anyone will read it. All the big hitters here appear to be too busy creating their own excellent works to bother offering much encouragement to new members who post quality articles by upvoting or commenting on their posts. As a quick proof of this, check out any new members first post. If they get any comments or upvotes at all, check out those people and see their reps. When I look, I find theyre all also new members with low reps. There are a small number of whales who do engage and encourage, but its a very small proportion.
The whales must take the time to be supportive and to just simply read, comment and encourage a few posts a day. Engagement needs to work both ways and it's not always about the rewards, an encouraging, helpful comment and a little upvote is all it takes to give a newbie a genuine boost and keep them working hard to improve.
I'd suggest anyone joining should first read and learn, and work out their own niche topic before they post. Find similar niches and join in with discussions whilst slowly posting an occasional piece of content.
Also, not everyone who comes here is a great writer, or even wants to write. Some come to learn, be educated read and join debate. Steem is sold as:-
' Steemit is a blogging and social networking website on top of the Steem blockchain database. '
There is a perception upon joining thats it's going to be a 'paid facebook' which thankfully it isn't, but people dont find that out until they arrive. There needs to be more facility for social interaction though as this will encourage more people to join in the debate and prosper, not just the high quality content providers, it seems there is a certain snobbery here about content 'quality', just because people are not always able to put there thoughts into words so well does not make their opinion any less important.
Steem is also a wonderful experiment in empowerment, the rewards can help drag people out of poverty, look at the amazing Philippines community here, an amazing example of teamwork and interdependency.
There can be as many helpful and wonderful guides as you like, but without a fundemental shift in attitude by many of the older members to new members, Steem will not flourish. Self perpetuating reward generation amongst whales is finite.
So whales, read, encourage and mentor please (REM!), its your responsibility.
PS Sorry I couldnt find a wonderful acronym. Niche, Learn, Engage, Comment and Create.....NLECC doesnt exactly trip off the tounge !
PPS Looking forward to Saturday :-)
There has always been an ongoing debate on whether you want to start dishing out your best works when you first join steemit because of your low influence and visibility so your Pulitzer Prize piece might go unnoticed.
Then there are others that say after your introduceyourself post, which hopefully generated some interest for you, you should follow up with another great piece to keep people's attention. If you start doing one the many challenges out there and it is not exceptional. Chances are you would loose people's interest and you'll just be a number in their list of people they follow but not really engage.
I love this concept and a lot of the whales are delegating their SP to Minnows and Dolphins because there is just too many content out there and they do need to sleep haha.
There has been a shift in the balance and power, not that big but as the platform continues to grow we will see a significant rise in the number of dolphins that engage the community.
So keep Steeming and creating content because you never really know who is out there and may chance upon your good content post and boom you are being curated and get a lot of attention, get followers and hopefully engagers and just keep building relationships and good content.
@steemitfamilyph we believe in educating new minnows who just joined with the essentials like how to write good content posts, markdown guidelines, engagement and a sense of community not just dropping their post promotion and leave.
We found that those who are engaged are the ones that eventually become successful in Steemit. Educate, Create, Upvote, Reply, Engage and Community - ECUREC is not as catchy as she did haha.
So much great advice!
I haven't been here long, but I've seen decent success following a lot of the same rules. Originally, I was only posting twice a week because that was as often as I thought I could create quality posts. However, after a few weeks, I started building a back catalog of posts ideas and decided to bump it up to 4x per week to start test different posting times and get more exposure.
I'd say my weakest point at the moment is engagement. I do what I can to compose and post at least a handful of replies per day. That's about it though. I really need to make more time to get involved with the community in chat and Discord (I'm just so shyyyyyy... And kind of weird).
Anyway, great posts with a lot of good tips. Thanks for helping us minnows figure out how to better navigate in the Steemit ecosystem!
Weird is good, it keeps all the 'normal' people on their toes....and as you mentioned 'weird', Im now off to check your blog :-)
Ha, well thank you! Maybe weird is an overstatement, though my partner would probably argue that fact (because he sees the weirdest of it behind closed doors :P). I am definitely awkward, but I’ve learned to own it :)
Thanks for sharing your insights. It's so tempting to just post for the sake of posting and then sitting back and screaming ' Please LOVE Me!!'.
If all else fails take leaf from the IT Guys: try turning it off and on again. Take a break, walk away, keep walking till you see something cool, come back. Write about it.
Cheers
Or try doing some challenge from the contests tag. Always fun stuff there to inspire.
For sure! Almost need to set up a posting diary to make sure you don't miss one of the contests.
Thanks Techslut for your post, I agree with you as a minnow, I am investing actively in my sp and so far I am happy, though I don´t want to rely on bots to be successful, I truly get happier with a ,001 from someone who really liked my post.
I am following you since I saw one of your comments on fitinfun, I think we need more bloggers like you in the community, at the end it will not be all about profits but rather for professional and amateur writers to be themselves. If people wants cheap content and fake Instragramers they know where to find them :D
Nice Post!
But seriously, nice post. I found this to be an interesting read, and it really made me thing a bit about what I do right, and of course wrong. It also made me realise that a lot of the problems I have in my life, I end up with here. The essence of that being, I am (and will probably always be) an introvert.
Don't get me wrong, I do like people, and even some engagement, but in general I love observing people and other conversations, I form my opinions and views, but I forget to engage. The part I really found valuable is the "20 comments" a day section. It made me realise that I think the comments, but I don't always put it down in a reply. I look at a piece of art (my hangout area of choice), and I think "Amazing contrast that this piece.... etc etc" created, but I rarely write it.
The other thing your post made me realise, is that unfortunately, creating nice content, and enjoying creating nice content is not enough. That my stuff will probably get lost in the Steemit Void, never to be seen again. Thus creating nice content, goes hand-in-hand with finding other nice content, and also engaging with other content.
So thank you very much for the post, it was really insightful, I am going to try (against my nature), to be a bit more engaging! Don't know if I will reach the 20 comments a day, but I will give it a try.
You'll get there. And you'll get addicted to commenting. And then you'll get double-digit payouts on your comments. You'll see. :)
We will have to see, now I just need more good people to follow so I have great things to comment on. ;P