Bout sums it up, huh? Lol what a post.

Pay attention to your first image and title of the post

That's a big one to me. Essentially marketing on a micro basis. Your photo and title are your post's billboard. I've been bad about photos with my posts lately, and those posts without pictures don't do as well.

What is steem chat? I've not heard of it in my nine months here.

As for vote buying, since I'm a little dude, I buy votes for other folks all the time if I don't feel like my small vote is enough. Went through a brief affair with the bid bots, but it wasn't sustainable to me, and I felt like I was really cheating.

The best advice I found when I first started here was to be active in commenting. It gets your name out and gets you embedded into the community. With that advice, I'd pair a membership with @dustsweeper because they help turn dust voted comments into realized income, which helps a lot. Though, I'm not sure if they'd go against your core buying rule.

Solid post. And yes, I'm buying you a @treeplanter vote.