Steempress website, referral system, settings page and guest account claims
Dear followers. We hope you've had the time to read our plan for onboarding the masses and updated roadmap and growth strategy that we shared last week. In it, we shared our updated roadmap which included the promise to deliver a new referral program and landing page this week. We also said we would start allowing you the community with more opportunities to contribute.
In this post, we will introduce our new landing page for steempress.io, referral system, updates to the settings page and finally how guest accounts can now get a Steem account once they've received enough upvotes on their comments.
Our new landing page
You can now visit our new website on steempress.io:
About the landing page
Our website is still work in progress as we aim to add new content which again will change the overall design and layout. Our plan includes adding a "Discover" page for users to find SteemPress blogs, posts, and communities, as well as a blog for our future updates and also featured community articles. The current version is mostly there to support the release of our referral program. So expect to see continuous improvements in terms of features as well as the appearance and design over the next few months.
We also decided to add a small feed of recent posts published with our plugin that has the SteemPress comment section enabled and received decent curation. This based on our idea that nothing beats an actual demonstration to showcase the value both Steem and SteemPress have to our users. You can expect this part to be expanded on further once our Discover page is finished. If anyone has problems with seeing their content appear on our website then please let us know. We can add an option in the new settings panel to disable this if desired.
All posts featured on our landing page and future Discover page will link directly to the same post on your own WordPress blogs.
Updated settings page
Our settings page has been drastically improved since we introduced it briefly in our 2.5 update. First of, it has been completely redesigned to fit our new colors and visual identity. In terms of features, it now includes your own referral link, basic statistics on your blog (we intended to provide more detailed statistics on your content's performance as a part of our gamification and "encouraging design" strategy), as well as your old "post queue". For this update, the referral link is the important part.
Find your referral link
To be an affiliate, login to the new settings page on steempress.io with your Steem account. There, you'll find your unique referral link that can be shared anywhere. This link will direct anyone who clicks it to our new signup page where your Steem account will be set as the referral.
New account creation process
The "Get started" button found across our landing page will direct visitors to our new sign up page where they can get a Steem account. Visitors who arrive through a referral link will find that the Steem account of the referrer is set in the referral box on the bottom. Here, they can apply to get a Steem account for free from SteemPress by verifying their blog.
Once we've checked that the blog is legit and not a spam account, they will receive another email that they can use to claim their free Steem account.
The referral process
To ensure our new service is not abused, we will require a verification of the blog requesting a Steem account. This will be done by requiring the visitor to enter a valid email address and blog URL. We will then send them a unique code for them to enter into their own WordPress dashboard in order for us to know that they are the true owner of the blog.
Once this is complete, we will verify the blog to see that it is a serious website that would at least qualify it for our lowest curation standards. This means that it is a properly set up and designed website, has original content and obtains organic engagement. Once this is verified, the blog owner will be able to claim their free Steem account and receive a delegation from SteemPress.
Referral earnings
Anyone who makes a referral through our signup page will earn 10% of future rewards and payments done by the new user they refer. This means that with our current 15% benefactor rewards, a referred account will instead have 1.5% set to their referrer and 13.5% to SteemPress. Furthermore, once the upcoming subscription-based pro versions of SteemPress are launched, the referrers will also earn a passive 10% on their subscription fees.
We hope that this will excite people to go and search for bloggers or influencers who might want to start a blog and ask them directly if they have heard about Steem and if they would consider using SteemPress.
Guest accounts
As promised in our last update, guests who make comments through our plugin will be able to claim their free Steem account once they have earned at least 5 Steem Power through receiving upvotes on their comments. Once that amount is reached, they'll be able to claim a Steem account and receive 5 STEEM as Steem Power from SteemPress.
Shared marketing material
We want to share all the marketing material that we create with those interested in making referrals. This in order to help them increase their success rate, which is obviously in everyone's benefit. This may include our logo files, banners, powerpoint templates, brand guide, invitation letter bloggers, and pictures for use on different blogs or on social media, etc. We also invite all community members to share their suggestions or provide their own material for others to use. We plan on adding a folder with all of our own material in a pinned message on Discord, but please provide suggestions if you have any on how we can best share and co-create such resources if interested!
Discord updates
We've also updated the channels on our Discord server to better reflect our new goals and objectives. This includes a dedicated channel for questions, discussions, and suggestions related to the #referral-program. We hope that many of you will share our belief that together we can grow not only SteemPress but also the Steem userbase. We will therefore do our best to facilitate and encourage an active discussion on how we can improve our referral program, provide better material, and also have a discussion between all of you on how to be a more effective affiliate.
Final comments
We expect that some work will still be needed to improve the referral sign up process. We would therefore highly appreciate any community member's effort in helping anybody they try to onboard to Steem through us to share their experience in doing so. We will do our best to make the process smoother and more intuitive, as well as to provide better information about Steem that a new user will need.
As always, if you have any questions then please visit us on our discord channel!
To download SteemPress, find our plug-in at https://wordpress.org/plugins/steempress/
All the best,
@Howo and @Fredrikaa
Awesome work guys! The site looks great.
Just wanted to test out your guest accounts, but when I click on "Sign Up" in the comment section, nothing happens (I can see that a request is sent to your API though, but I don't get a confirmation email either).
Btw, what are your plans for marketing Steempress to bloggers? At TravelFeed we are currently reaching out to many travel bloggers personally to get them to try out TravelFeed. We should talk about a joint marketing campaign to get existing Wordpress travel bloggers to publish from Wordpress to TravelFeed using Steempress.
Thanks! Things are really starting to come together! :) And happy to hear that the site looks good!
It seems our Hivemind node had crashed :/, it is fixed now! Would love if you could help scrutinize the comment section and signup/login as ruthlessly as you want and share whatever issues you find, things that don't seem intuitive or looks good, or other suggestions for improvement.
We mentioned briefly in our road map and growth strategy post that we'll take a systematic approach to grow one subject / content-type at the time. Travel is indeed on the top of our list here since there're both so many good blogs out there and also a pretty good community for it here on Steem that they can connect to. Beyond our own direct approaches, I also want to involve community in a number of ways. 1. This referral program that allows anyone to try and reach bloggers directly in whichever way they see fit. We'll want to support this in any way we can by providing good marketing material and a place on our Discord for people to discuss and share experience from doing this. 2. I want to see the many curation projects we're supporting take on an outreach and multi-media strategy. So far, many seem to do the standard compilation posts of posts they've curated, without trying to make it SEO friendly, engaging or share it on other social media platforms. Would be cool if we could help these communities grow and attract more eyeballs to Steem through their content too.
Awesome! I'm all ears. Either poke me on Discord, or share whichever ideas you may have here so perhaps others can also learn from the examples. We all want projects to succeed at marketing Steem!
I read your roadmap; I have always believed that the only effective way of marketing Steem is not marketing Steem itself but platforms built on top of Steem. Out of all dApps, you have the best approach on this that I have seen so far; some of the ideas you mention have been on our radar as well, such as a post ranking based on multiple factors including curation project upvotes and SEO/views.
I sent you a long reply on Discord about a possible cooperation, hope it wasn't too overwhelming :D
Thank you sir for this information;
I'm gonna take lead from Rwanda.
The site looks neat, and although the information needed for new users to get on the wagon to start blogging using steempress is already there, I think if the number of users who have already installed steempress plugin in their WordPress can be shown to tell people about the popularity of the plugin, and it would be awesome to see.
Great idea! Thanks! And happy to hear that you liked the website :)
YAY! So excited this is live - however, a little less excited because this week is going to be super busy for me, so likely I won't have a chance to fully suss everything out right away. I do have a few WP blogging friends in mind that might finally take the plunge though, once I can do up a proper "Join us on Steem" post. Thanks for making the onboarding process easier!
Happy to hear that you're excited about this! I sure am too ;). Would be amazing if you could do a "join us on Steem post" that adds a few key reasons why WordPress blogs should consider joining Steem through SteemPress! That and/or a quick beginners guide is certainly something we could feature on the website once we develop it further.
Sounds good,@fredrikaa! I touched upon it a bit in my recent 2 year Steemiversary post, and I'm working on a "FAQ from WordPress bloggers new to Steem" (hopefully with a catchier title...LOL) that I hope to have posted early next week. 😊
awesome, you are moving fast now.....the referral sounds amazing and the onboarding plan rocks.
One quick comment. On the section how can steempress help your blog, I would move monitize to the end....steem has been plagued with the wrong expectations.
We sure are! A full summer worth of Steem hackathon has given us a lot of ideas and product. So expect fun times ahead ;).
I completely agree, and have been giving Steemit Inc critique for this for years. That's why in the two first and most striking value props are the ability to reach people in a new way and improving engagement, and not having the "make money" argument there at all. Putting it first in the set of value props below then made sense in order to present something not already mentioned. As we add the featured blogs, to the main website, I think even more focus will be on the community value of how being in a place where creators have a shared incentive to see each others grow and succeed will come across even more as the main reason to get excited, which also does not depend on reward.
I think the opportunity of making something of value is nice, but it should be centered around helping Steem gro to make ones tokens more valuable, not on what one can do just earn tokens.
In any case, thanks for the feedback! And I'm sure we can do a lot together to grow this place! Always hungry for ideas for community initiatives that can be facilitated on our website or Discord that helps all SteemPress users succeed, and where the community members such as yourself can take ownership of running it.
Very cool indeed! I love how this platform keeps looping me around with incentives 💯👍🏻 It’s so nice to be super rewarded for my content, my curation and now referrals as well.
Thanks guys, I feel the love and respect you have for us steemians and I’m very proud to be here. 😊✌🏼
Happy to hear of your interest in earning by being a referral! Feel free to DM me on Discord or reply to me here if you need any help in using the referral program, or could benefit from having any further material or information!
Thanks for the reply Fredrikaa I’m steadily building up great content and curating all the hot best stuff in Steem. I feel that should boost my channel and referrals with more success. I will be in touch 👍🏻
I have shared my referral on linked in : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sanjeev-m-92850a7_blockchain-bloggers-activity-6582156628638957568-zx-i
Lets see, if it hits few people to onboard here.
I am very happy to read the update mainly on refferal system. I am pretty sure that a steempress will have more new users.
And this big news must know by all community.They will be happy to a part of the platform.
All the best for Steempress.io.
Regards from Indonesia.
that was remarkably easy to set up on my wordpress blog. I'll write something new and see what happens next
Wow, allowing guests to earn their own Steem accounts is a really good idea! I wonder how long it will take users to earn 5 SP?
Very good initiative @steempress & https://steempress.io/
Referral program is always a good tool to help growing user but please make sure that a referral program is designed well so that only real and active user signup. We had a website where initially introduced referral program and website was flooded with users but the sad side was that out of these user only 1-2% were actually using the website and rest never came back.
So my suggestion will be to introduce effective referral program to help grow both the part(Referrer and the service provider, in this case steempress.io )
Best wishes from my side & do let me know if I can contribute by any means :)