The Secret Steemit Formula - The 80/20 Principle

Posting less but still earning more sound like quite a paradox right ? Shouldn't I multiply my chances of earning more by posting more ? Actually I would say, with great conviction, that posting less will allow you to earn more! Read along and I will show you what I mean.

I work for a company that does art and craft products, and thanks to my boss I learned something very important. He started off this company by selling toys. During the first 10 years he had more than 10 000 different articles that he was selling. It took him a long time but after many years, and a huge headache, he realized less is more. He studied the sales and went back through the years, what he found astounded him. Among the 10 000 products he was selling at the time 20 percent stood for 80 percent of the turn over. This is how I learned the 80:20 rule.

The 80/20 rule is originally called the Pareto principle. It is the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity where roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. The connection was made when Vilfredo Pareto was studying in the university of Lausanne. Pareto discovered that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He also proved the theory through planting peas. It was found that about 20 percent of the peapods he planted contained 80 percent of the peas.

I found this ratio perfectly correlates to my blog post on Steemit. If I go through my post page i will find that 20 percent of my posts reflects 80 percent of my earnings.

These 20 percent of posts could then say to be 4 times as successful as the other 80 percent of posts. So why is that ? If I study these successful posts I find a pattern. These are posts i really thought about and used a lot of time to create. The other posts is usually something thrown together more in a hurry.

Falling Flat On The Face

Now a lot of people will say. I have spent so much time on posts and then it falls flat on its face. Well if you are relatively new on the platform this does happen for sure. And that leads me to the next point why you should post Less.

"Look At Me"

We all grow up craving attention. I'm sure you have once said: " mommy, daddy, look at me, look at what I can do! " . This craving of attention doesn't really change, we always continue wanting attention. That means when you are sitting and waiting for others to acknowledge you and your posts others are probably doing the same. Don't let them wait.

Curating Is Key

I believe the 80/20 formula can be used here as well, but in a different way. Use 80 percent of your time curating, and only 20 percent of your time posting. Trust me your posts will start doing a lot better. You have to give to get.

Blog Diarreha

Another good reason to post less is that no one like someone with blog diarrhea. If you post too much you will flood the feed page of others. So when people visit your home page deciding if they want to follow you or not, it's not good if there is one post each hour, and all topics are random, it will definitely discourage someone to follow you.

If you on the other hand have a blog page with nice articles, that reflects who you are then many people will be drawn into your work and they will decide to follow.

Think Like A Whale

If you were a whale what kind of post would you vote for ? You would have a lot of choices as there are new posts popping up every minute on Steemit. Most likely you would choose something with value right ? I believe this could be a good way of thinking if you want to make a successful post.

I am not saying that we should only post long essays that take hours to write. I am not saying that we should only post once a day. I'm just saying that we should remember that quality pays off. It will give you more upvotes, heavier upvotes and also better exposure. Just one really good post can get resteemed and spread like wild fire, it can give you many loyal followers. And who knows maybe later when you go on steemvp, you realize that the top followers are the ones who started following you from that one great post, and when you sit down with the calculator you realize that their upvotes is 80 percent of your steem income .