Great post, I'm sure there are many new steemians, as well as potential new recruits that may come across steemit thanks to you writing this on your website, who could take some advice from you (or just learn some the basics thanks to the simple way you presented it).

To your comment that a new user will need to either invest in STEEM or have a friend with a lot of SP, it is worth pointing out that community projects such as @steemSTEM, @ocd @curie, etc, do great work at rewarding quality content. However, we certainly need many more such groups, covering different topics, if we want to achieve a better correlation between quality and effort on one side and rewards and visibility on the other.

And finally, thanks for mentioning SteemPress! I hope we can continue to provide creators like yourself with a useful product while lowering some the of the barriers you rightly mention for other bloggers to come onboard as well.