Earning Money vs. Making an Impact on Steemit, or, Why Your Best Posts Aren’t Earning The Big Bucks

Do you ever feel like you aren’t being rewarded for creating great content on steemit? We all experience disappointing payouts on this platform. Even the best and most successful authors among us have posts that flop.

There are two facts about Steemit that I don’t see many people talk about, which I’d like to briefly address:

1. Content that gets a lot of attention is different from content that gets a lot of money
2. Steemit’s design amplifies your feelings of FOMO and Frustration, so you gotta adapt.

This post will talk about fact #1. Tomorrow I’ll talk about fact #2. Cool? Cool. Let’s do it:

Views vs. Money

The content that gets the most views is DIFFERENT from the content that gets the most money.

This is a fact for me. My highest earning post has 26 (!) views: https://steemit.com/technology/@heymattsokol/art-and-anxiety-on-the-information-superhighway-why-social-media-can-be-bad-for-artists

There are a some nice comments and I’m super thankful for the money and the attention - but, in all honesty, this is a very low amount of views.

In contrast, one of my most popular posts has 300+ views: https://steemit.com/money/@heymattsokol/my-quest-for-creative-financial-freedom-pt-1-intro-explanation - but only earned around $15.

Why Don’t Money and Attention Work Together?

The way to make money is to get whales to vote on your stuff. However - whales are super busy and most of them don’t have time to read your content.

On the flip side - the people with the least value in their accounts tend to have the most time. They’re newer to the site and still exploring, searching for content, reading and engaging with their favorite authors. These users will give you attention, but their votes are worth very little.

What to do? Make content to bait whale votes, or appeal to the masses? I’ve tried to strike a delicate balance - creating legitimately valuable content that also has an immediate “whale appeal” to show whales that I’m worth voting on.

You might choose a different route. I’d suggest that getting attention is more important in the long run. He or she who has the most attention can leverage that attention into big money down the road.

The Real Home Run

We’ve all seen the truly successful posts: Sometimes, an author manages to get thousands of views AND thousands of dollars on a wildly successful post. Does this disprove my theory?

The truth is, very few posts can get a ton of attention and money all at once. This usually happens after an author creates a huge amount of great work over a long period of time, earning many whale and minnow fans alike.

If you create some content that caters to minnows (attention), and some content that caters to whales (money), these two audiences will gradually connect to each other. After about a year of hard work, it seems possible to have a steady and powerful audience who reward you well for your content.

The question is simple… will you put in your year of hard work?

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. If you think I’m wrong as hell, I wanna know why.

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