Roll up, roll up! Free tips for n00b Steemians

If you've ever used Steemit (which I'd be surprised if you havent given you're reading this but stranger things have happened), you will realise that this social media platform has a steep learning curve.

Get it? Steep? Steem?

Anyway I digress, I have been a Steem user for nearly two months and I wanted to share some of the things that I have found useful and also some of the mistakes I have made so you can avoid them. Let's jump in:

Use Gina bot
Steem currently does not have a notification system, while there is one in the Steem development pipeline, that doesn't help us right now. That's where Gina bot comes in. Gina stands for the "General Independent Notification Automaton" and will provide you with all of the important notifications you need. Instructions for signup are in the link below:

https://steemit.com/ginabot/@ginabot/ginabot-the-best-notifcation-service-in-the-steemiverse

Commenting is more profitable than blogging, at least at first
I noticed in the first month that the vast majority of my Steem earnings were generated from posting comments on other people's content, as opposed to the posts I would write that would be lucky to generate more than $0.05. I wrote about my experience trying to post 50 insightful comments in one day here:

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@cryptocartograph/i-posted-52-comments-in-one-day-the-results

I am by no means alone in this and have seen many others post similar comparisons between commenting/posting. I believe it is far better to engage and build your own following through comments initially, than by focusing on your posts. This will also help you to become less discouraged with Steemit if your well written posts are going unnoticed.

Voting power is limited, but it does recharge
Every time you vote, the monetary power of your vote diminishes and it recharges over 5 days. Generally people will advise you to keep your voting power above 80% so that you are always able to make high power upvotes.

You can keep track of your voting power, reputation and other stats by checking yourself out on:

steemd.com/@YOURNAME

Don't ignore the Steemit apps
It's not all about Steemit, there are many apps built on the Steemit blockchain that are worth engaging with. Many of these (such as Dmania and DLive) have large steem power delegations from the founders of Steemit and hence can be very profitable to use. But please avoid posting any plagiarised content as there is already too much of this, and you are likely to get blacklisted/flagged for doing so.

Don't over-delegate
It's possible to delegate your Steem Power to other users/bots through SteemConnect, many will reward you for doing so, but make sure to keep some SP held back as otherwise your bandwidth will be limited and you won't be able to perform actions on Steemit. I made this mistake, heed this as a cautionary tale:

Do not power up your posts at this time
There are many articles available showing the maths on why you shouldn't select your author rewards as 100% SP. The payouts are currently borked and you will end up losing money, you are far better off with the 50:50 SBD/SP split.

Don't pick fights
There are many people fighting to clean up Steemit as the potential of real cash payments attracts a lot of plagarisers/spammers. As a level 25 account, you are very vulnerable to a large downvote which could wipe your reputation out and cause you to become a social pariah. Try to keep it constructive at all times to minimise this risk.

Be careful with upvote bots
Much has been written about the bot economy and you should be aware that there are users who seek to abuse them. There are several ways to do this, but I want to focus on one method whereby a user will use a bot to upvote their own content 6.5 days after posting and essentially get an immediate payout.

This allows them to upvote crappy, spammy content and milk a reward out of the Steemit blockchain. Now to mitigate this many upvote bots have a 3.5 day voting limit, this still allows Steemians to downvote highly rewarded content that is spam. However, some bots do not have these limits, and using them can result in you receiving a significant downvote from accounts who are currently opposing them. You won't get a warning shot, so take this as one. You can view stats on the major bot accounts using the following link:

https://steembottracker.com/

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, so what are some of the mistakes you wished you had avoided? What are your top tips for new Steemians, please share in the comments below!