Steem-Travelers is the only travel community on Steemit. Traveling has enormous potential. On the Internet, it is one of the most common blogging themes, along with culinary and fashion/beauty blogs. What shows that the content presented in our group is attractive? In less than a month from the group's founding, we managed to achieve 389 subscriptions. The number of active users during the last week varied between 115 and 132. At the time of writing this post (20.10), it is 123.

Steem-Travelers recorded the third-highest user growth of all the communities on the platform (+98 users). The growth was calculated by comparing the number of active users 25 days ago to 10/19/21.

Our task is to build a place friendly to all users, create a community in which bloggers-travelers and photographers-travelers will feel comfortable, and as a result popularize the platform and increase the value of STEEM.

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Community Team

At the time of writing this post, we are talking to one of the users about joining our team as a moderator, so probably when the steemcurator team will be reviewing our application, we will be already in three instead of two. At the moment, however, the community team includes two people: @papi.mati and @willeusz

Both administrators and the potential future moderator are members of #club5050 and share the responsibilities:

@willeusz is responsible for:

• checking plagiarism and commenting on posts in Spanish and partly in English
• running a Facebook account
• running a Twitter account
• translation into Spanish all posts from the community account
• selection of winners in competitions and booming support posts
• verification of new users
• promoting the group outside of Steemit

@papi.mati is responsible for:

• checking plagiarism and commenting on posts in English
• running a discord
• writing posts from a community account
• selection of winners in competitions and booming support posts
• verification of new users
• labels for the delegators
• activity as the greeter
• promoting the group outside of Steemit

Our administrators are rewarded for their work through booming support. @willeusz gets booming support once a week, and @papi.mati every two weeks. That difference is caused by a lower income of @willeusz in a non-community-related activity on Steemit. Thanks to the smart distribution of the responsibilities, working in the community takes us only 3 to 5 hours a day, every day.

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Community Curation Account

All announcements, contests, and other important posts are published from the community curation account. We launched the delegation program by posting quick links to the SP delegation under each post of that account, we also wrote a detailed tutorial on the delegation process and its benefits.

The Community Curation Account stored in 26 days a total of 9 712.36 SP, of which 1 790.84 SP belongs to the community and 7 921.52 SP is from delegations. It already has a reputation over 61.

The community receives delegations from 15 users, which is 12.4% of all active users. This percentage is systematically increasing. We try to educate everyone about the benefits of delegation and motivate them by presenting short-term goals. For example: On October 18th we wrote a post "Help us to reach 10,000 SP". At the time of publication, we had 8 515 SP and two days later, together with other users, we collected 9 712 SP.

In addition, many users choose to spend 10-15% of their publishing profits on their curation account. It's not mandatory in our community and we don't take this decision into account when selecting booming support posts, but we appreciate it very much. By donating a percentage of the author rewards, we get an additional profit of 4-5 STEEM weekly on average.

We know that overly pushing users to make delegation end up with a sharp drop in activity. We have seen examples of such activities in other communities. Therefore, we do not exclude people who do not delegate SP to the community. We do not reward delegates with additional votes from the curation account, we do not take into account delegation when choosing booming support, nor do we force users to give part of their profits to us. Instead, we use positive reinforcement, inform about benefits, mark delegates with additional labels, thank them for delegations in comments and messages on Discord. In the publications, we try to use the terms "we", "our community", build the connection on the level of used language too.

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All money earned through the community curation account goes to power-ups and prizes in contests. Nothing is being nor will be withdrawn. To speed up the growth of the community, in the first week of its operation, @papi.mati transferred 175 STEEM, which was used as a fund for the awards. Today, the community curation account maintains +/- 200 STEEM to secure funds for rewards for 2-3 weeks, and anything above 200 STEEM is converted to SP.

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Plagiarism and Abuse

The curation account is used as an informal greeter every few days. We visit the Newcomers community and search all Achievements 1 in English and Spanish for users who write about traveling as their hobby. We invite them to our community and share some other basic information about Steemit. Consequently, many of the people at Steem-Travelers are new users.

New users tend to make mistakes. They are just learning how the platform works. That is why we have prepared a simple tutorial for them, including information about what photos can be used on Steemit and where to find them, or how to cite and mark inspiration in posts. The tutorial also contains information about the most important hashtags (including #club5050 and #steemexclusive), explaining their meaning and telling when they can be applied.

Our anti-plagiarism policy is quite clear:

1). If someone makes a minor mistake, they are informed within 24 hours and asked to edit the post. In the request, we include a link to our tutorials with which we ask you to read. If the post is edited, we forget about it. Everyone has the right to make a mistake, and if they learn a lesson from it and never do it again, there is no reason to hold a grudge.

The minor mistakes include:

• accidentally publish a photo with copyrights
• no designation of a short quote
• Marking as #steemexclusive a post that was not plagiarized but was published by the same person on a different platform, for example, a personal blog or Hive

2). In case of serious errors, we inform the user what did they do wrong, tag @endingplagiarism, and mark on a specially prepared list that they were trying to cheat. Profits from such a post are reset by downvotes, and the user cannot earn any contest rewards or booming for 7 days from plagiarism. If the same user tries to cheat a second time by publishing plagiarized content, his account is muted and he will not be able to post in the Steem-Travelers community anymore.

The serious mistakes include:

• content plagiarism over 50% of the total text
• publish a photo with copyrights and sign it as their own

Since the foundation of the community, we have had over a dozen minor mistakes and four major mistakes which have occurred: 5/10/21, 13/10/21, 16/10/21, and today on 21/10/21. I believe that the amount of plagiarized content in our group does not differ from the norm, but we are very effective in finding it, hence as many as four cases mentioned in the post.

In a special Excel document, we note which user tried to share plagiarized content so that we always know whether it is his first offense or a recurring tendency.

Absolutely all posts published in the community are checked for plagiarism by administrators in up to 24 hours since published. @willeusz is responsible for publications in Spanish and occasionally English, @papi.mati only checks posts written in English.

We check the text using two websites: plagiarismdetector.net and check-plagiarism.com, and the photos using the Google Lens application. Each post that passes our test positively receives a short annotation in the comment ("This post is plagiarism-free"). That way is easier for other users and the steemcurator team to vote for it without the need to check it once again.

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Engagement and commenting

We proudly admit that on 19/10/21, engagement in our community was the highest among all communities on the Steemit platform with more than 50 active users. As much as 32.54% of our users remain active. We have achieved such success thanks to many activities:

• we comment on each post and try to enter into a discussion with our users. Our comments are not simple, consisting of a few words. We always read the publication and try to refer to its content in the comments.

• we motivate other users to do similar activities by organizing a comment competition #travelers-say. The competition rewards those of our users who frequently visit other publications, up-vote, and comment in a valuable way. In the last edition, it generated as many as 58 comments and contributed to the increase of authors and curation rewards. More details HERE

• we organize numerous travel-related contests, including a weekly photo contest, a competition for the most interesting article on a specific topic, and recently a travel movie review competition, which is reserved for people participating in #club5050 program.

• we try to reward users fairly by distributing booming votes among the best authors, but also ensuring that the author receives booming votes no more than once a week. In rare special situations, it's twice per week (explanation below in "up-vote policy")

• we are always available on discord. We try to create real bonds between users and make them feel safe and at home in the community. We break the barriers of admin-author, we emphasize that the community is our joint work and we should all care about its development.

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Our up-vote policy:

In a special document, we mark all the awards that the author receives in our community. When someone is rewarded with booming, the next six days are marked in yellow in the table, When they win the competition - the next three days are marked in yellow. When a post receives a vote from the Steemcurator team, three days are marked orange.

If two yellow colors overlap, we mark them in orange, and the case of three prizes overlapping each other, in purple.

Yellow indicates that it is advisable to give the booming that day to someone else, but if the publication is perfect, we can give it to the same person.

Orange means that booming cannot be given to the same user these days, as he has already received two awards recently. This helps to distribute the rewards more fairly.

Violet is a color that can only appear in the event of superimposed prizes in competitions, as booming never goes to the same hands three times a week. Only one user has violet color next to his name, but that guy's work is always great and he simply couldn't win the contest.

All booming votes go to #steemexclusive posts that have not previously been rewarded by the steemcurator team and that do not receive upvotes for delegation to bot accounts. Since the introduction of #club5050, at least two out of three booming are distributed to Steemians who use that tag.

A total of 55 authors were awarded in our community in the last 26 days. Community Account has voting CSI 19.4 (0.00% self, 142 upvotes, 88 accounts, last 7d)

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Plans and updates

Our plans for the next month are as impressive as the recent achievements:

1. We intend to extend the tutorial for new users with new valuable publications, including those about the aesthetics of posts and the commands used in HTML, vote automation, and some tips on how to increase the chances of booming support
2. We are going to introduce the program "Guide with Travelers" where users will be able to offer their services as guides in their city or region in exchange for a small fee in STEEM or SBD
3. We intend to reach at least 15,000 SP and 200 active users by the end of next month
4. We are going to hire a new moderator (as we mentioned in the earlier part of this application, interviews with the candidate are already underway)
5. We intend to continue popularizing #club5050, organizing competitions, and creating a user-friendly place.

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Promotion

We actively promote the community both on the Steemit platform and beyond. Internal promotion includes activity as an informal greeter - every few days we review dozens of posts from Achievement 1 written in English or Spanish and when the user mentions traveling as his hobby, we invite him to our community. In addition, we mention Steem Travelers when writing our Diary Games and on other occasions. We always do it in a balanced way, we never write spam.

External promotion includes setting up an account on Facebook and Twitter by the community. Steem-Travelers is also advertised in traveler groups and private messages to our traveling friends.

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#Club5050

All administrators and potential candidates for a new moderator are members of #club5050 since the official announcement of the program. We also strongly encourage other users to do the same with quite positive effects. Of the 47 publications created in the last three days, as many as 36 use the hashtag #club5050. We are seeing an upward trend among Steem-Travelers members. Most of the 11 posts without a hashtag were written 2-3 days ago.

We advertise Club5050 in all sorts of ways. Already on the day of announcing the program, we created a post about its assumptions and rules. We pinned it to the board and announced the change on our social media, including Discord. Users who did not use #club5050 were informed in the comments about the new program, and the attached link allowed them to be quickly redirected to the post with the rules.

We also included #club5050 in our publication about the most important hashtags on Steemit, and we remind about the program in other announcements from time to time.

We have announced that at least 2 of the 3 boomings supports distributed every day will be booked for participants in program #club5050. We remind about it by publishing a new list of awarded publications each week and marking on it which authors participate in #club5050

We have also started two additional projects that may encourage users to join the program:

• the first is the weekly lottery for members #club5050, which will take place every Thursday. A randomly selected winner will receive 15 STEEM as a prize.
• the second is a special competition only for people participating in #club5050. The competition will be held every week.

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Also check:

Verification
Our verification process works very smoothly. We offer users two forms of verification. Anyone who publishes without verifying the account is encouraged to do so through a relevant comment with a link to the verification process.

Our guide
Our guide for new and old users includes some of the most important information and answers to frequently asked questions. There you will find info about delegations, power-ups, withdrawing money, converting TRX to STEEM, photos from creative commons, and many more.

Stay with travelers
This is a fledgling program in which few people participate so far. We hope that when the group grows and the restrictions related to the pandemic cease, it will be a significant part of our community. It allows you to rent a flat or a room from another user in exchange for STEEM or SBD.

footer

The footer was prepared by us a few weeks ago and is systematically expanded with new options that we manage to attach. It allows for quick and simple contact with administrators, redirects to our social media, and enables quick delegation of SP to the community. It looks like that:

DISCORD:
Contact ENG
papi.mati#3791

Contact ESP
Willeusz#2348

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Please, consider delegating SP to our community:

25 SP || 50 SP || 100 SP || 150 SP || 200 SP || 250 SP || 500 SP || 750 SP || 1000 SP || 1500 SP || 3000 SP

Link to the Discord Channel:
https://discord.gg/nm2aDMVdMg

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Summary

We believe that over the last month we have managed to achieve a lot: we built a community from scratch with over 390 subscriptions and over 120 active users, we achieved the highest activity rate among all groups on Steemit, we stored almost 10,000 SP in a very short time, we set up social media accounts, discord, four regular contests every week, tons of posts with tips for new users, special events promoting #club5050 and steemit in general ("Stay with Travelers") - all in less than 30 days.

We have been working hard every day to achieve this success and we will be happy to continue this extremely satisfying work (which is not only our responsibility but also pure fun and we believe that's the clue to achieve the success). However, for our community to develop, we need help. Our funds are not and for the next few months they will certainly not be enough to keep users in the community without booming and SC01 support, so we ask for the greatest possible support that will allow us to grow and make Steemit an even more attractive place.

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Thank you for reading,
@willeusz, @papi.mati, @hive-111293 (Steem-Travelers)