6 Reasons It's Hard to Get Seen on Steemit and 16 Specific Things You Can Do to FIX it Today
So, you're having a tough time getting through these days? Join the party! So, why is gaining attention on Steem getting so hard these days? After coming back from a hiatus, I've been studying the situation, and I've come up with six reasons I can see that this is happening. I'm sure there are others, but here, in no particular order are some things you're fighting against.
New Users
We all want steemit to grow, or do we? As long as the price of steem, the coin at the center of our universe, rises, the rewards pool will grow, making it possible for enough steemers to make bank for us to maintain an active community. But, at the rate we're growing, that's becoming difficult.
Why do I say that?
Well, according to @exyle on this Vlog post yesterday, we are setting huge new records for opening new accounts! That's a good thing, but, it increases the competition for eyeballs, while simultaneously adding eyeballs.
We are adding up to 50,000 new account every day!!!
So, the equivalent of a small city, are walking into steem land and setting up shop on a daily basis. Wow! That's going to cause some ripples, but that's not all folks!
Amount of New Content!
The number of eyebals is increasing, making followers easier than ever to find, but the number of posts being added to our ecosystem is enormous! The blog post you worked so hard to create this morning, is going up against tens of thousands of others. It's hard to stand out from the background!
Just how much competition do we have?
I'm glad you asked! Are you ready for this? No, wait, guess....I'm serious. Just get a number in your head before you read any further. Okay, got your number, great, drumroll please!
According to Bloctivity, our one day record to date is....
250,000 POSTS!
That's right, your post is going up against a quarter of a million others. To put that in perspective, the record number of transactions on the block chain is only 1.9 million. And that includes everything! What do I mean by everything?
- Starting new accounts (50,000 a day)
- Transferring coins
- Powering up
- Powering down
- Posting
- Upvoting
- Downvoting
- Resteeming
- Following
Everything. So, if that 1.9 million transactions were all upvotes, that would leave us with a total of 7.6 votes per post. Think about that. But, like I said, upvotes only account for a tiny fraction of those transactions. If, for example, upvotes accounted for 1/4 of all activity on the steem blockchain, that drops it down to less than two votes per post!
So, if your post got more than two votes, you are above average!
That's right! The fact that I'm averaging 15 votes per post, puts me so far ahead of the curve, it's staggering, but my wallet doesn't know that!
Varying content types
This one is a killer for us writers. While we spend our time meticulously choosing the write words to share, other steemers (read slackers) are getting paid to share memes, like this one, on Dmania
While it may seem like cheating, two services in particular make it possible for users to create content rapidly, or share content from other sources, such as YouTube accounts, that are featured in smaller circles on offsite platforms. One of these is Dtube for video, another is Dmania for memes and funny short video, and yet another is Steepshot, lifestyle posting of single images with a title and a description.
Leading posts in these venues are not reaching the heights of top trending posts on Steemit, yet, but they are making multiple hundreds in payouts for short, easy to craft, or curate content.
Upvote Bots
If you've been reading my stuff for very long, you'll know by now, I'm not a fan. I'm not saying I won't eventually break down and use them, but I think they're hurting the system.
Right now, it's virtually impossible to compete without them. Unless an author builds their own active audience of upvoters, their best shot at getting content discovered, is the "hot" and "trending" tabs in any category.
Here's why
All of us are competing to earn our share of the prize pool, and that competition is increasing. In addition to giving the best curation rewards, the hot and trending posts are where the action is.
The have thriving comment chains. They get resteemed and mentioned. If you manage to attach yourself, in a solid comment, with a ink to your content, one good trending post could take you places.
But, the holy grail, is to hit trending for your own content! Right?
The algorithm is too simple
In my opinion, the algorithm that feeds us steemit content is too simple. Rather than include things like reputation score (based on number of replies to content and comments) number of comments or resteems, two things matter, vote count and payout amount and we all know that payout amount is king.
That's where the bots come in
Content that achieves early attention (votes and rewards) is moved to the hot content list. This list seems to roll pretty consistently with how fresh content is, so things don't stay at the top of it all day. However, the top "hot" content, if it continues to garner support, moves to "trending" where $$$$ are king!
A writer like me with no bots is at the mercy of his fans. If they come in early and place votes on his content, he used to have a shot. But, when a bot can provide an instant upvote, or even group of upvotes, it's unlikely that I will beat that post out for that spot.
And, because of this, most of the top posts that don't belong to whales, are bot voted.
Curation trails
With one of the latest hard forks, code was added (as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong) to allow for outside apps to auotmate voting from accounts that volunteer to be a part of a curation trail.
In other words, you sign up, you give them a percentage to use, and they place votes, while your account, like a bot, follows them and upvotes right behind.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, on its face.
A well managed curation trail could do a lot of good for the system.
- Focused on specific types of content, curation trails can bring them to the forefront, getting it the attention it deserves.
- Well curated trails can move around, "sharing the wealth" as it were, over a wide circle of accounts.
- This type of support can give developers, artists and even journalists, the support they need to develop their content.
But it's not all fun and games!
Since a vote for you, pulls reward power from any votes cast for me (remember, limited prize pool generated daily) these groups can make individual votes less powerful by consolidating the rewards power.
- Curators have a lot of power to decide who succeeds and who will be ignored.
- With 250,000 posts a day, no one can see them all, many good things still get skipped.
Imported audiences
This phenomenon started happening right from the beginning. Stars from a hundred different platforms, bloggers, streamers, YouTubers, all saw the opportunity on steemit, to increase their earnings in a much less stressful environment, with fewer competitors.
While it's impossible to convert an entire audience from one platform to another, a YouTube account with a million or more subscribers would bring more than enough following to do quite well in our simple rewards system, and they have.
It's all part of the world we live in.
If you haven't heard me say it, you're new to my stuff, welcome. We live in an attention economy. Anyone that can build an audience can make their fortune and I don't fault these entrepreneurs for doing what they do.
On the one hand, it brings a lot of attention to the platform, including investment dollars on the exchanges, which means more coins in my piggy bank. On the other hand, many of their followers are just here for them and don't engage on the platform to help build useful content.
Most of them also tend to mine shallow veins.
While they share great content, they tend to stick very close to the surface, following trends to get their audience engaged. That's great, but I'd love to see more of them challenge their audiences to dig a little deeper, build something of value. Some are. Accounts like @Jerrybanfield are developing new apps on the blockchain.
So, if they get a little off the top for the attention they raise, it makes it possible for me to write my stories and keep the lights on for another day, all in all, not a bad payoff.
Killer Whales!
If you haven't witnessed the epic battle between Haejin and GrumpyCat, you're missing out. On one side, you have a self styled crypto commentator, flush with alt coin cash, buying his way to the top. Then, posting up to ten commentaries a day, with varying levels of quality content.
On the other hand, you have GrumpyCat, AKA, I believe, BernieSanders, king of the little guy, in a flag war to the death. While I don't agree with everything Bernie says, and I've told him so, he's right. One account taking that much of the prize pool daily is a detriment to the project. But, we play into it.
Much like in the real world, we like to complain about the 1%, while in reality, we build our own "Killer Whales"
Who would invest in a crappy home daycare center their neighbor was running, hoping they didn't lose their capital, if they could invest in fortune 500 companies at a nearly guaranteed 12%? Nobody. But, to break the cycle, it might be time for us to consider giving up our short term gains for a bigger principle.
- Consolidating wealth by always voting for the biggest posts, creates more of the same and hurts your own odds of attracting an audience.
- More, smaller payouts, would increase stability on the platform, while still giving a large number of steemers a chance to stick around and build
- Community, not flashy posts, will be the long haul solution to building wealth on steemit
So, Mark, What do you suggest we do about it?
I'm glad you asked. First, upvote this post and resteem it. (joking/not joking) we need to start a big conversation on this theme. Write your own post and mention me in it, or don't, but spread the word! I've got a lot of suggestions of steps you can take. I'll give you three big ones and a list of bullets.
Build community
Just like Dmania, Steepshot and DTube, creating community spaces where a curated feed of content can be enjoyed with less competition and noise, any smaller group inside of steemit can help you get more votes and followers.
- Take the time to comment, reply, upvote, resteem and @ mention other accounts to help start conversations and build relationships.
- Promote other users, even beginners, to gain loyal followers. I'll be sharing how you can find out who your fans are in the next few days, you need more!
- Produce good, helpful content. If you don't want to teach people to steem, teach them something. Use part of your energy to help other users.
If you can't beat them, join them!
Sites like Dmania and Dtube and Steepshot, might seem annoying. They're getting paid for smaller bites of content. But, it might be worth putting up one or two posts on these sites from time to time. Also projects like @adsactly and @utopian are designed to give opportunity to individuals in a group context.
- Sharing other content will put you in front of a new audience!
- You'll also discover some amazing steemers you didn't know before!
- You can fight the future, or you can join it. This trend is not going away, it's an open source blockchain and more Dmanias are being built as we speak!
Focus on New Users
The platform is growing so fast! The new users represent untapped resources! If you want an audience, there they are. There are some challengs, such as the fact that many of them are ESL learners who don't have great English skills, but you can help them fix that.
One quick story here. I had a young African author ask me for tips. His post was amazing, but his English was atrocious. I suggest Grammarly.com, a free editor, to help him. His vocab was great, but his syntax was janky at best. Two weeks later, he posted a comment asking me to take a look at his new post, the improvement was AMAZINGG!!!
- Planton grow! That grateful plankton will soon be a profitable minnow, and maybe a dolphin some day, all while upvoting your content!
- The odds are in your favor. If you attracted 1/10 of one percent of the newcomers in one week, that's 350 accounts! The possibilities are staggering!
- They are ready to be shown the ropes. Give them a little help, and they will bring their friends to you.
It takes time to develop talent. I've been in that business my whole life and I love to teach. I know that some of my own biggest fans here are people I encouraged to share on steemit. You never know what that person may achieve. Give it a try, what have you got to lose?
pro tip: you can find newcomers in the "introduce yourself" tag, look under new and leave them a link in a comment.
Now, here's my bullet list of short suggestions.
- Post daily, stay in the mix, increase your odds of getting seen.
- Experiment with different tags, get into new audiences
- Try different styles of content. Stick with what works, but add new stuff
- Support your supporters! Upvote them, do unto others and all that jazz
- Brand yourself, either develop a visual style, like @meesterboom, or start a regular feature, like #dolphinschool
- Comment, comment, comment. This is probably the most powerful tool for attracting attention, always leave your link, like this @markrmorrisjr
- Avoid spamming people. Don't hijack comment threads. Don't piss people off.
- Ask questions. This is a huge way to get people to talk!
- be patient and consistent. It can take some time.
- Join contests and projects
- buddy up to "curators" like @naquoya who post list articles, they'll mention you eventually
- Stay positive. This place is really cool. Be grateful for what you DO get.
- Share other people's work, it makes them feel good.
Well, I could do this all day, but I want to enjoy some time with my family, so, if you enjoyed this, please...
This is some good advice. This system as I have come to see it is really amazing and it only works for those who take their time to read. I think this post needs to reach my followers. Especially, those newbies in a community I'm trying to put up. Great work.
So, did you resteem it? That's the best way, or take a look at my blog and do what I did for @steemgoblin. I put a post with a link to his post, didn't take rewards, but that way, my followers are more likely to click through. Thanks for the comment! Come back often!
I think getting seen for newbies is equally hard in any blogging site. Actually because of the curation reward incentives, seem power holding and paid post promotional services, getting a quality content noticed and climbing up the ladder, I would say, is still much easier for a newbie on Steemit rath than any other site.
yaah dear steemit is much easier then other site as great soure of income as well as sharing of knowlege!
familier with people from diffrent part of world! i really love the steemit!
Glad to hear it. Where else did you blog before Steemit?
i working on blog now a day ! but after hearing steemit so leave the social media like facebook etc and now i m addicted to steemit!
Good for you. I'd recommend you take a look at Grammarly.com for writing in English. You're doing great, it can help you with your grammar and it's FREE!
Another cool tool you may want to look into is Text Help's Extension, Read&Write for Google Chrome.
Great advice! I have trouble finding decent tools, globally available and free to recommend. That's a great idea, I will check it out too!
yaah i want to improve my english! i have a lot of grammer mistake !
Well, most of us English speakers can barely write in one language. You're awesome to be out here sharing in a second language like this. Good for you!
thanks you plz you look side on my post! nice to meet you! from where you are !
That could be true. It's kind of designed to help you. But, I'll tell you that getting past the base level is tougher than it's ever been. I've been here 18 mos and still go through days with very little attention.
Hello @markrmorrisjr. I don't even know where to start commenting about this post because it contains a truckload of informative content all rolled in one. Also, one has got to love the steemit community most especially because it supports different kinds of content creators like dmeme, dtube and the likes. This is what makes the community amazing and interesting because of the different kinds of content. Also, as you mentioned its truly difficult to get a new bie's post seen but truly there are so many other users here willing to provide assistance to others in one way or the other either by contests , upvotes and the likes. In short, this is a great article which should probably fetch you more than a thousand SBD but as you said, the steemit community has different way of working. Notwithstanding, we the little fishes inside this big river appreciate your amazing contents and stories. Keep up the good work.
THANK YOU! That comment just made my day. I can't upvote it with 100% or I'll run out of vote power before I get to all of the comments I need to upvote today. Thanks. That meant a lot.
You're welcome. I'm looking forward to reading more of your awesome contents. Thanks for sharing constantly.
There is nothing worse then to try your best to write a quality post and in the end you don't even get 20 views. I found this very frustrating but if I try hard enough maybe I will have breakthrough some day
Okay, don't tell anyone I said that though. This is a work smarter, not harder equation. I took a look at your account, and relax, your brand new. Not even a month yet. One thing I'd suggest is to check out the #dolphinschool hashtag in search to get some good ideas about what to do. Comment more. I see you've not been very consistent in that. Are you upvoting? The more you engage with other authors, the more you will get love from them, on that note! THANKS FOR THE RESTEEM!!!! I'm launching a bootcamp for plankton this next week to help you become minnows and hopefully move on toward dolphin status. Your content looks okay. (secret, the "writing" tag has the single highest average payout per post of ANY category, use it when you write as your first tag)
I literally took a screenshot of your reply( it has some really nice tips) . It was really hard for me to do anything these days because of my exams( med student) , I know it will maybe sound like I am talking nonsense, but making money is not even in my first 5 reasons why I joined steemit, my main goal is to write something about things I truly love and to be noticed , to discuss with someone about my post theme , and in the end to have a community that will comment on my posts and it does not matter if they have 1 dollar on their account or 10000 dollars . Firstly I was flooded with bot profiles or profiles who clearly beg on steemit so it was really depressing , but now I will give all of me to build some following community for me . Next post will be really top notch I will write about how our "Past Memories create future us " . Sorry if this was to much but I am really glad that someone genuinely notices me . Best of luck
No, it doesn't sound crazy. I've followed a life in the arts ever since I was 14. Most of that time, I was not focused on money at all. Now, in my older years, I'm looking at money as a way to do some of the things for myself, my family and in service to others, that I have not been able to do. And I love your post idea, our ideas become our realities and we get more of what we focus on, our memories are part of that. Steem on!
Thank you for writing this. Just earlier today I was debating whether I was making a mistake sinking the amount of time into Steemit that I have so far, but I’m feeling encouraged to keep trucking along now.
One question....I’ve been advised both to only post a few times a week, and once a day. Is “once a day” solely to keep your name out there on a regular basis?
There is so much action on steemit that once a day is minimum. Not many of your followers are reading every single thing you post, or upvoting it anyway. But, break it up. Try using Steepshot, or Dmania, or doing a video on Dtube to break it up. I'm doing a giveaway you can get in on, if you look down my blog roll a day or two, and the hashtag #dolphinschool has lots of good stuff. Come back often!
I wonder how many of those accounts remain active. I'd bet many people give up on the idea of having an account by the time they are even approved. Takes weeks for people to receive their account.
A friend of mine here in the states got his in four days. I think it depends on activity on the platform to provide the SP loans to generate the accounts.
Great tips & ideas.
We (the minnow mass) can beat the whales bots re the rewards pools.
We just need to ensure we look for and vote for good content rather than chasing $ on a whale/tending post
I agree, if we could spread the word on this and support each other better, we might have a chance!
Thanks @markmorrisjr I am resteeming your advices.
Bye
Thank you! I appreciate your support!
cool man for your valuable guidline!
its help us in steemit community to increase follower and view our post by many people!
thanks for your valuable post!
Thanks!
Steemits a joke and Dtube is the most inferior video posting site on the entire internet. I’ve posted internet content and videos for 12 years, yet for two weeks cannot post even a 30 sec clip on the shit that is Dtube. Steemit won’t exist in 3 years time.
Well that's one man's opinions, they're like assholes, everybody's got them and they all stink. This joke has paid me over $90k in the past 18 months. So, why are you here?
To troll nerds like you and trigger your sensitive, steemit defending fanny. Funny how anyone who calls out flaws in Steemits joke of a system is marginalized and profanely accused via inaccurate assumptions. Good for you and your 90k, you must be a hell of a kiss ass to the big whales. Thumbs up bruh.