Quickguide to Steemit Success

Let's suppose you are an individual with good blogging and writing skills. Perhaps you are a great photographer or have a track record for creating and editing good videos. Today I want to talk to you about the Steemit platform, how you could monetize this work you already do and why you should consider joining.

NOTE: This post is for new users and people who have yet to join. The platform runs a MERITROCRACY type of system which means the amount you will earn is directly proportional to the quality of your work and the amount of followers which upvote and comment on your posts. Some users create Facebook groups which form tribes of steemers designed to help share and promote content which results in better reward ratios.

Firstly, let me tell you a bit about myself. I spent six years of my life completing college and university curriculum and graduated with a degree in computer engineering. However, when I began working I quickly realized I needed to find other ways to generate income not because I was making little money but because I no longer had time to pursue the activities I loved in life. Over the last four months, I have tried many different ways to make money online. Some have turned out to be scams, while others are opportunities which I'm still developing as income streams.

One such opportunity I'm currently putting all of my time into is a social content sharing platform called Steemit which has been around for a little over two years now. The reason why you would want to join Steemit and become an active user over other social platforms like Facebook and Reddit is because Steemit will pay you for curating or creating and sharing useful content. Something every new user should do if whenever possible is read the Steemit whitepaper which explains how the platform works.

As you will see if you read the white paper steemit has a complex economy which is not intuitive to users starting out. I don't know all the details but I will try to give you a basic understanding based on what I have read and understand.

Steem: A popular cryptocurrency which is free to transfer and runs on 3-4 second blocks making it one of the fastest if not the fastest cryptocurrency to transact. Some exchanges allow you to trade Steem for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Steem Backed Dollars (SBD): Steem backed dollars are similar to promisory notes (IOU) or signed documment acknowledging a debt. Basically you can redeem an Steem Backed Dollar (SBD) for about one dollar worth of Steem cryptocurrency.

Steem Power: Think of Steem Power as a savings account. The more Steem Power you have the more monetary value you can generate for yourself and others in the steemit community. There are multiple ways you can obtain more Steem Power including:

1- Posting high quality and unique content on the platform
2- Upvoting other high-quality content published by other users
3- Using your computer or other hardware to mine Steem
4- Purchasing Steem or Steem Backed Dollars (SBD) and "Powering up"
5- Successful user in the community delegates some VESTS to you

NOTE: Think of Steem Power as a fund or sum of money you keep in an account which grows and then some day you can "Power Down" and withdraw equal payments for the period of 104 weeks. A better strategy according to multiple reputable steem users is to repeat the power down cycle every single week right after receiving payment because active users in the community with high reputation will grow their Steem Power faster than they can consume it when they power down. In this way you increase your weekly payment every single week you remain active in the platform either curating content or creating it. Something else to note is that VESTS is nothing other than share units which make up the power up fund type of account. To check the number of VESTS in your account and other helpful information click this link and change "raterlabs" to your own steemit username if you already created an account.

NOTE: When it comes to upvoting most sources I have read from say you will be best rewarded if you attain the skill of finding NEW AUTHORS that write a post which goes on to become very valued content within the platform. Whoever is first to upvote such a post will receive the bigger reward especially if they do it early on. There are many different strategies you could use. What many users do is use services like steemvoter.com to casts automated votes any time their favorite content creators upload a post. Some people find this to be an unfair practice because there are times posts with low quality get lots of upvotes due to autovoters. My advise to you is to find ways to grow your reputation so that one day you could get automatic upvotes. These users had to work very hard to attain their followers who upvote their content. Also don't forget to add new deserving users to your autovoter because this will help continue to grow the community.

There is a lot more complexity to Steemsian economics some users even show you how to know your Steem Power Interest Rate.

I don't know all the details but my research shows that on a general basis the payout is broken down like this:
1- 25% of the total value goes to the content creator in the form of Steem Power
2- 50% of the total value is paid to the content creator in the form of Steem Dollar (IOU)
3- The remaining 25% goes to the people that upvote/comment

Now of that last remaining 25%, some rules apply:
*If a post happens to be uptoved just moments after being published, 100% of the CURATION REWARD is earned by the author. So if you put a lot of work into an article you can upvote it right when you publish it and if it becomes popular then all curation reward is handed to you. Some authors like Jerry Banfield who hold lots of Steem Power
and became a steem witness are able to earn 20 Steem Dollars or more for upvoting their own content.
*When a post gets upvoted 3 minutes after being posted 90% of the curation reward goes to the author and 10% goes to the curator.
*After the 15 minute mark is a 50/50 split and this is the configuration most autovoter systems use
*After 27 minutes 10% goes to the author and 90% goes to the curator
*After 30 minutes have passed 100% of the curation reward goes to the curator

At this point you should have a basic understanding of the steemit reward system. Now lets talk about how you can become succesful in this platform. The ideas I'm about to express are not my own because I'm not an experienced steem user but I'm drawing from the experience of some of the best users in this platform who have achieved 70 or more reputation points. Every single one of the top users say that Steem rewards you based on your reputation. You could be the most amazing author and content creator... if you don't learn to effectively rise your reputation you will fail and become frustrated.

NOTE: Due to steemsian economics you will find is a common practice for some people to create multiple accounts and split some of their Steem Power into each of these accounts. This is done because the more you upvote in any given day the less your vote counts. A vote casted with 100% voting power will results in a bigger tip to the creator and also a bigger curator reward for yourself for voting. As voting power goes down you will see your tip to the creator is less and your award as a curator is also less. Think of your voting power as a rechargable battery that tries to recharge back to 100% in a 24 hours period but you can only use so many charges each day for it to get back to the 100% mark.

Some sources recommend to vote 12-16 times per day. Others recommend to do 20-30 times. I believe 18-20 times per day is the safest bet based on everything I have read up to this point. The reason to create multiple accounts is because it allows to have more overall voting power and it also allows to delegate back all of the power to one account should the user want more Steem Power in a single account. I have mixed feelings about how this works but I know many users so called "whales" do this in order to tip more money back to content creators as they also attain more Steem Power of their own and curation rewards. One last fact I want to share with you is that you should not post more than 4 posts per day because you will receive penalties that will result in less payouts. Keep in mind every update you make to a new post like fixing an spelling error counts as a new post and there are better times of the day to post.

So what is a whale? Steemit as a platform or organization has ways to rank the users in their community by the perceived value they have added.

The first step toward rising your reputation right as you start is to announce yourself as a new member of the community. Not everyone follows the same ranking rules but these below seem to be the standard based on my own research. MVEST refers to 1,000 VEST held as Steem Power within the company.

Plankton - anyone who holds up to 1,000 VEST [1 MVEST] the Newbie in the community
Minnow - anyone who has 1,000 to 10,000 VEST [1 to 10 MVEST] the Super User according to some (Yey that's me!)
Dolphin - anyone with 10,000 to 100,000 VEST [10 to 100 MVEST] the Hero of the community
Orca - anyone with 100,000 to 1,000,000 VEST [100 to 1,000 MVEST] The super heroes
Whale - anyone with 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 VEST [1,000 to 10,000 MVEST] These Users Have Reached Legendary Status
Mega Whale - anyone with over 10,000,000 VEST a status which is currently reserved to the founders of the platform who have placed the most effort to develop all the features the community is pitching and the big investors that support the community by holding Steem Power.
Giant Squid - Also known as the whale killer few know about this rank which is held by the user with the most Steem Power.

So now getting back to the topic of rising your reputation effectively I want to share some tips that can help you advance much faster than I have. The first step every user should take is to become familiar with steemit.chat and create a post to introduce yourself. If you go to the steemit main page you will see the "Tags" section currently at the left of the screen. Those tags represent the most popular steemit categories and "introduceyourself" is one of the most user friendly and follower engaging tags you can use to KATAPULT your account through the ranking hierarchies. So make a concise introduction of who you are, your skills, and what you plan to do to help the community grow. As soon as your introduction is ready and you post it in the steemit platform go to steemit.chat and post your introduction there. There is a member of the community know as @gandalf who scours for good submitions and will often times reward your efforts by upvoting your content.

NOTE: Since introducing yourself is one of the easiest ways to grab interest from the community many people try to exploit the opportunity and create multiple fake accounts impersonating public figures. The whole point is to use the fame created by this other individual to gather quick votes which result in bigger rewards. As a result is commonly to see steem users writing the current date on a piece of paper to prove authenticity. As far as I have seen the steemit team will seek proof of authenticity anytime some famous person tries to join because they don't want to support scammers who take advantage of the community.

Don't just introduce yourself. Find out about other tags and channels within steemit.chat and post your introduction link on the relevant channels. A rule of thumb (based on the research I made) is that you are allowed to repost you links every hour. I think this is spammy so I stick to once per day and many times I only do it once so other people can have their share in being able to promote their content. There is a board in particular called "postpromote" which is so heavily used that is probably best not to use it altogether because your link will disspear off the screen in just a couple of seconds and burried into oblivion.

TIP: To post properly in steemit.chat you need to know how to properly link pictures. This is not too complicated just follow the example below:

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@raterlabs/reynaldo-rodriguez-introduceyourself>

Basically, you need the url to your post then you follow with [>] and lastly you want to put in between parenthesis ( THE URL TO THE IMAGE YOU WANT TO APPEAR IN THE CHAT NEXT TO THE POST URL )

If you are having issues uploading images to steemit learn to use a tool called imgur. Another tip I can give you is to use Markdown over HTML because your images will have less errors as in images will load faster and be displayed accurately. This is something I'm still learning more about, I have noticed there are times images I have embedded in my post won't load at all and is very likely because I have been using HTML tags.

Remember how we talked about Giant Squid and whale killers? Well in order to ensure authentic authors are rewarded there are bots known as "content detectors" which are programs that try to find pliagarized content. Probably the most famous of all these content detection bots is the Cheetah bot whom I have encountered in one of my posts before. The Cheetah bot will ban people who pliagarize their content. In some specific cases it will whitelist those authors who are known to post their articles in more than one place. In my case I post here and back on my main website so I probably should try to get whitelisted. The key point to understand here is to post authentic content, and raise your reputation level and rewards will come from the community.

The last thing I want to leave you with is a guide writen by another user to help you raise your reputation. To see results in steemit it will probably take you some months until some whales and dolphins find your content interesting and start upvoting your masterpiece. The start is difficult but if you work on building your reputation eventually you can make some decent money using this platform. Part of my path to success is to write content for my website so why not try to monetize it as well. I will write the content anyway because I want Google to send more organic traffic to my website.

I want you to also note that photography is big in the Steemit community. So if you are an awesome photographer perhaps you will find yourself at home in this community. Kodak as of recently has decided to create their own blochain technology which will help track picture rights to the rightful authors and help monetize good pictures. Reddit on the other hand has seen an introduction of "tip bots" which allow users to tip other users with cryptocurrencies such as doge coin and IOTA. Facebook is not a total waste of time either if you have a big following there. You could use places like TOMOSON to find brands that will send you discounted or free items to your home in exchange for posting comments in your Facebook timeline or twitter feed. Some of those brands will even pay you if you happen to be a big influencer with thousands of followers. This is why one if my bigger goals is to have more followers. Followers turn you into an influencer and being an influencer will open a world of opportunity in being able to generate a living by promoting certain products.

So to summarize I hope this information is useful to you and I hope you decide to join the community. Feel free to leave me a comment below and connect with me in steemit.chat. I hope in a year or two you reach Whale Status and this platform continues to grow and produce great content. Something I have seen is that my posts on steemit often times will outrank the same post on Medium or on my website... so from a SEO perspective to get more eyes on your content this platform is worth using. Generating some income is just an added bonus. Right now I will start learning more about how to use Pinterest as a tool to drive organic traffic to my blog and website so my next post will likely be about this topic. Until next time!

PS: One last thing I forgot to mention is that there are services which take take SBD or Steem payment in order to help you find whales and dolphins to upvote your content. This is probably worth it from an investment point of view but I would rather have a genuine individual that liked my content to upvote. You should also keep in mind currently it is the mega-whales and witnesses who verify the integrity of the network that hold the most power but this won't be the case in a few years. There is currently a power shift going on which attributes the most power to content creators who remain active on the platform. Ultimately your goal should be to become an engaging content creator if you want to reap the most benefits from using this platform.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own any of the pictures used in this post. I thank their respective authors for uploading them to Google.