I have been on this incredible platform for a month now and I wanted to share some important tips for new users based on my short but fantastic experience to date.

So.. what is the best way to hit the ground running and make the most of yourself on Steemit? Here are my top tips (in no particular order):

1. Make your first impressions count

• Writing an excellent and impactful introduction post is a great way of welcoming yourself to the community. It is very important you tag “introduceyourself” as the community is always keen to meet newcomers and support them and the introduceyourself thread is the best place for that purpose.

• In your introduction post, it is worth spending a bit of time to ensure your message is clear and written in a way that captures the attention of readers. Including pictures, humour, compassion, emotion and just being yourself will improve your chances of getting across to readers.

• Try to communicate what makes you different and what you intend to bring to the community. For me, that was statistics and technical analysis.

2. Build followers and start following!

• Start following people that write content that interests you and make the effort to comment on their posts and interact with them where possible.

• Build up your followers by introducing people who are new and making connections. This may seem like a lot of effort but the more connected you are with the community the more you will get from it. I have built up a lot of followers in the last month.

• Connect with users with significant Steem Power (as well as newcomers) by taking an interest in their articles and writing interesting articles that will attract bigger fish! Remember, an upvote from a Whale can carry as much weight as 1000 newcomers. It’s not all about payouts but It is good to have a mix of followers to ensure you get good rewards for good content.

3. Try not to be put off by low rewards at the start

• This is very important and easier said than done. I guarantee that most people will write many incredible articles that get very little credit. This is not necessarily a reflection on the quality of your post but can be related to many other factors such as luck/timing, how established you are, your follower base etc. Just take a long term view and consistent quality content will win out in the end. And remember, $10 of Steem Power today could be worth $100 in a year’s time.

• My personal experience has been that you win some, you lose some. There are some people in this community that consistently make significant rewards for their articles. This might seem like easy money but I assure you that in 99% of cases, this reflects very hard work over many months. Most of them will have started out like you and built their way up.

• I have been very surprised both by posts of mine that have performed well (in terms of rewards) and ones that performed less than expected. Sometimes, it’s a short meaningful message written on the bus ride home that will have the greatest impact. Other times, you will spend a couple of hours putting together something you feel is brilliant only to be met with tumbleweeds.

Stick with it, keep writing and be proud of your content.

I hope you found this helpful.