We are so excited to be making our first post here on Steemit! We love the idea that a community can reward great posts without having to hammer the readers with dozens of ads that ruin the experience. Here's our verification post to confirm it's really us.

We're excited to join a platform that allows our community to create amazing posts and share their stories and thoughts with us! Our community truly is special. They have so many great stories, thoughts, recipes, etc. and we can't wait to see them all flourish on this platform. We are bringing the country to Steemit!

How to Get Started On Steemit

1. Sign up for an account at https://steemit.com/pick_account
   (Back up, print and save multiple copies of your master password! You can NOT get a new one if you lose it. This is very important!!)
2. Make sure you follow us here at @cutencountry
3. Once you have your account setup, send us a message to our page at https://www.facebook.com/cuteandcountry/ with your username and we will reward you with a 40% off discount code for www.cutencountry.com for joining our community here.
4. Start writing and sharing your own stories and thoughts.

How Does Steemit.com Work?

Before we get into explaining how all this works, please know that if you need some help understanding any of this, we are available through our private messages on our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/cuteandcountry/. You can also ask in the comments below once you have an account.

Steemit is a very different than any other social media site you've ever used before. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, when you make a post here on Steemit and get upvotes (similar to a like on FB or IG) you can earn rewards in the form of Steem Dollars and Steem Power.

Steem Power is the measurement of your influence on the site and the more you build up, the more voting power you have and the more your vote is worth.

Steem Dollars you can do a number of things with. One of the most popular options here on the site is to turn your Steem dollars into STEEM, so that you can "Power Up" and turn it into more influence with Steem Power.

We also have an exciting way for you to use your Steem Dollars to buy Cute n' Country clothing! Once you build up at least $5 of Steem Dollars, we will offer you $1 of Cute n' Country gift cards for every $1 of Steem Dollars you want to trade in. Again, just shoot us a Facebook message once you are ready to do this. We can also discuss trading your Steem Dollars in for cold hard cash if that interests you as well.

How We Plan To Use Steemit.com

We plan to make 3-5 posts a day related to country music, something cute we found on YouTube, country living and other similar type posts. We will be using the tag #cutencountry for all of our posts and encourage our community to do the same so that we can keep track of everyone's posts and interact with you.

Here's a list of other tags we plan to start and build:
countrymusic
countrycooking
cutestories
countrylife
horses
countrydecor
fishing
hunting

And here are just a few examples of artist based tags we'll be getting going:
lukebryan
blakeshelton
mirandalambert
georgestrait
carrieunderwood
keithurban

As you can see from the example, the best way to tag posts about singers and bands is to do it in all one word without spaces. If we all do it the same way, it'll help us find your posts easier to share, vote and comment on.

Long Term Vision for Our Community

Our goal is to build the community here on Steemit.com first. Once our community is large enough and can support it, we are building a discussion forum that will be integrated with Steemit.com that will allow us to block out all the other posts and have just our community's posts visible. We estimate that this should be ready sometime in the Fall of 2017. It's currently still in development.

Guidelines for Using Steemit.com

We just wanted to share a few community guidelines that are important to follow on this site.

1. Photos: Don't use other people's photos without permission and telling us who took it.
2. Copy/Paste: Don't plagiarize other people's work by copy and pasting it here.
3. Provide Value: If you share a video or a photo, write your thoughts about it. Share a story. Add some value to the post through your own words. This is very important!
4. Have Fun!!

Ok, that's all we got for now. Get that account setup and click that little up bottom at the bottom of this post!