How Newbies Avoid Frustration on Steemit

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

I hear a lot of complaints about newbies not getting people to see their posts. Not comments about it, complaints, even accusations against the platform. That means they think it SHOULD somehow be different.

I've experienced how hard it is to get new posts seen as a newbie myself. But for me, there is nothing to complain about.

That's because I've had blogs before, both on my own website and on Medium, plus guest blogging on other people's blogs. I know that when you're starting out on any blog you expect it to be crickets except for however much you promote your post by linking to it in other places or paying to promote it.

I think the thing with Steemit that makes people have a different expectation (so be disappointed) is that this is a mashup between a blog and social media. On your own website, you know no one is seeing your article if you don't drive them there to see it. But on Facebook, for example, you only joined because you had friends on there. So there was a ready made audience and the FB algorithm intentionally showed your posts to new friends a lot for quite some time.

Here on Steemit there is the expectation of an experience like FB because it is on a platform, not one's own website. But there is no algorithm here sending people to you! And for most of us there isn't a friend/family network already here to "introduce us around." Friends of friends aren't suggested for us to follow.

In general, it's a lot like having a blog on your own website, even though it's hosted on a platform. We should feel grateful we have the chance to have articles seen at all before we have collected a community of followers. That perspective will make us feel inspired when we see a stranger upvote our post, rather than deflated when we see we only made a couple pennies on an article we put a lot of work into.

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Source: Pexels - Markus Spiske

The closest comparison to Steemit is Medium, where you blog on a shared platform. Have you ever blogged on Medium? If you have, you'll realize that you have to do a lot of work off Medium to drive people to your posts there. They are shown to strangers much less than on Steemit when you are first starting out. In fact, after over a year blogging on that platform, I still haven't figured out how to get much visibility. I've even joined prominent publications on there, but still my articles are seen by maybe 50 people in months! My comments on other people's highly visible posts get a ridiculous number of likes though, so I know that people like my content when they actually see it.

Contrast that with Steemit where within my first 10 articles I've been able to attract upvotes from many, many people I never knew before. I even have some friendships growing on here that I think will last a lifetime. And on top of all that, I actually get paid when people like my stuff!

Now Medium is trying this new feature where when you like (clap for) someone's article they give that writer some money. I'm not clear on how it works, but I think ad dollars have something to do with it. Clearly they are trying to learn a thing or two from Steemit. But I think the Steemit crypto model is a better one than the old advertising model. And anyway, I go back to my previous observation that this is only going to help the established writers on the platform or new people who come with a massive following they can drive there from elsewhere.

In the end, I don't think there is anyplace else on the entire internet that a new blogger can get as much visibility and earnings as on Steemit. It is the nature of being new at anything that you have to pay your dues.

How you pay them on Steemit seems to come down to:

  • Write as close to once a day as you can manage, and make it the best article you can write that day
  • Comment on other people's posts a lot and make them genuine comments. Put some thought into your comments that make them worthy of being read by the people you're writing to.
  • Make it easy for people to find your best articles by linking to them at the bottom of your current article (something I'm just starting to do myself)
  • Remind people that you'd like them to resteem if they like the article. A lot of people will if you remind them, and just don't think of it otherwise.
  • If you can afford an investment of $100, buy some STEEM and use it to powerup so that you have more SP. This will allow you to have a more powerful upvote and eliminate bandwidth issues I've heard of newbies often encounter. I did this early on since I had that much sitting in a coin on Binance that I'd grown to not want anymore, so just swapped it for some STEEM. If you can't afford this, see if you can find someone you've interacted with who has a lot of SP and ask them if they can delegate 50 or so SP to you for a month. You'll be able to use that to get a lot of traction in that amount of time, before it reverts back to them.
  • If you can afford another $50 or so to invest in your career here on Steemit, consider buying some SBD and using it to pay bots to upvote your article when you first publish it. I'm still experimenting with this, and have never personally experienced it getting one of my articles onto the trending page. I may not be spending enough money on a given article. But I do see that my articles where I've done it get more upvotes than ones where I don't. So could be that just on the "new" page where you may be seen for 10 mins. if you have some money showing on your post those first 10 mins., more people are likely to check it out. Then if it is a good article, they'll upvote it themselves, both because they support it and because they want some of the curation rewards. You can check for available bots and their costs here: Steem Bot Tracker
  • Keep your reward setting when posting to 50/50 instead of putting it all toward SP. Then powerup your SBD to SP. You'll get more SP that way so long as SBD is worth more than $1 USD. And if you want to earn SBD so you can pay the bots, you'll definitely be better off earning both. Right now I power up everything because my SP is low.
  • Join contests! This is the way I've gotten the most visibility on here.
  • Read all the many posts on succeeding on Steemit. After your 5th or so, they will start sounding redundant, but I find that every one has at least one new idea for me. If you are serious about this as a way to become a paid writer, then apply yourself to mastery of it as a professional would.

If you can do these things, and also make this mental shift from seeing what is challenging for newbies to seeing what is a blessing in this opportunity, then I think in not long you'll be incredibly happy with your Steemit experience. You'll start having more revenue but even before that, you'll start having more fun. And isn't the point of doing anything because it makes for a happy life to do it?

Check out some of my recent posts:

Is there anything else you can think of that can lead to newbies being more excited than disappointed about how it is first starting out here on Steemit?

Resteems always appreciated!

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Great post, really useful for newbies!

Well done ..
I liked your work .. wonderful words
Creativity and patience .. Who works hard deserves
Thanks for sharing this with us

I think of it as eating the feast one bite at a time. If you just keep going, you'll get there. And the process is quite enjoyable as you go!

Good job on the article. I really like how you put the links on the bottom like you suggested as something to do. Resteemed and am following you. I hope we stay in touch and read more of one another articles.

I'm shocked at how few people seem to take the time to put in a comment. I am more shocked at how so many of the authors do not like their followers comments. If you ever comment on one of my posts and it is valid I will upvote. We have to support our community.

I think for a lot of people it may be voting power and bandwidth issues. I've learned this the hard way myself lately. I've gotten so low on voting power that I couldn't even upvote someone a penny and saw that I needed to not upvote for 50 hours to get back to 100% voting power! And on the bandwidth, just today I saw I was commenting too much and my bandwidth was almost zero, meaning I wouldn't be able to do anything on the platform until it came back.

And I'm having all these issues having invested $100 in SP! Those people who can't do that and only have the delegated SP must have a really restricted diet of getting to interact. I am going to believe people are being as generous as they can. I look forward to having more SP so I can be more generous. I think there is some tie between SP and bandwidth too, though I'm not clear on that.

You got a point there :)

Thanks so much for the resteem! Nice to meet you.

I saw this post - gem resteemed by @suesa and I am happy to discover it.

I like the fact that not only you have managed to identify (in my opinion) one of the most important problems encountered by newbies (which is false expectations) but also propose some very important solutions.
(I only do not know about bots, not tried that yet)

I believe that we need to educate new people, but it is also important that the new people entering or thinking to enter, should be willing to learn new things and understand that it takes effort and time to 'build up' their steemit reputation and steemit friends.

And by the time they will manage to do that, rewards will be of secondary value :)

This post deserves a resteem, and it is done with all my heart.

Thank you so much! Your words really bring a smile to my heart. And thanks also for letting me know about your resteem and Seusa's. I'm now following you both.

Thank You!!
You can monitor your resteems by setting up @ginabot or by visiting steem.rocks/indigoocean (where you see all your steemit activity) + new followers
Please let me know if you need any steemit help, I have recently created a mini markdown guide you might find a little bit helpful :)
p.s. I have just sent you a twit, hope it will be well received!

Thank you so much. I've been trying to figure out ginabot, but steem.rocks is great. I see now that I'm also low on bandwidth! I never noticed that before. And all I've been doing is commenting, so I learned something else new. It's not just about the upvoting. I have to also slow down my commenting until I have more SP!

Good read, as a newbie here on Steemit, and also not a writer or a blogger, I used my other skills to share to the community. Since my wife @junebride and I love to travel and collected a lot of photographs along the way, I used those in my posts and added some short stories with them. Like what you've said, I also tend to join photography contests also to gain more visibility and commented on other posts if I have the time to do so.

I've been really delighted by the number of people I've found on here sharing artwork, whether photography, poetry, shots of their paintings. It makes for a much richer environment for us all. And yes, lots of contests for artists! That's one of the many things I love about this platform.

You know what? I don't know what kind of SEO Steemit does but I think writing curated articles might help with traffic from Google itself rather than just the Steemit Community.

For example, one of my most-read articles on Medium is "7 TED Talks that Reveal What Nobody Told You About Happiness, Success and Creativity".

That one has over 3K views. The stats show that 2,927 come from Google. Only 16 come from Facebook. And only 19 comes from the Medium community itself.

Speaking of which: does Steem provides these kinds of stats? That would be a good improvement to their platform because it would help us with our traffic strategy.

Anyways, thank you as always for a clear articulate article.

Steemit is reputed to have excellent SEO. It just takes time for an article to make it into the index, as always. I don't know if anyone has a project to collect stats on traffic sources. Possibly.

Hello Indigo Ocean,
I am a newbie and I greatly appreciated your brief, but informative article.
I was especially impressed with your very positive attitude and hard work reaps rewards line of thinking. I think the road to success is paved with hard work. When I first found out about Steemit I was amazed and very happy that such a vehicle exists. I know there are tricks, tips, techniques and plenty of nuances to learn, but I am not discouraged. It’s a challenge which I accept and I hope to enjoy the journey. It’s already been great to meet people like you and I hope to form friendships from these acquaintances. I will follow you and look forward to reading your other pieces soon. Any and all tips are appreciated. Thanks again.

Glad you found this helpful. I wouldn't exactly say that hard work is necessary though. I think you will do much better with passion, even obsession. If you love this platform and really enjoy learning the nuances, you may put a lot of time into it but it will never feel like work. It will feel more like playing a game, one that involves strategy, rewards, and great social experiences. It's a great game to play!

I agree with you. I am often asked why I work so hard and I explain that when you love what you do it’s not “work” it’s what you do. I think your right it is more of my passion and learning is more like a game. Thanks for taking the time to reply. I hope your move goes well.

I am late to this post. This is one of the more informative newbie posts. I think the point about steem power cannot be overstated. But, as you rightly say, you have to love your craft and be thankful for the platform that allows you that expression. Thank you.

Thanks for stopping by and leaving such a nice comment. I just followed you. Yes, the greatest value here really is the community of content creators. This is an incredible place.

I saw this post to someone I followed don't know him personally. But I thank him because I have now an idea on how to deal frustrations since I started 28days ago with no earnings lol. No one assisted on how to do the right thing. I just know steemit from a friend far from me.. she's busy with her own too so she can't assist me though. And also my grammar is not really good so, this quite difficult for me to make an article that I wanted to. Anyway, I'm @charity from Philippines

I'm so glad to hear that it is helpful to you. I know that it can be really hard to get oriented on here. May following the steps in this post (and the one I did right after this one on getting started well on here) really serve your success on the platform.

Looking forward to see your future post that can be beneficial for us beginners to this platform. I followed you. Thank you for having time to read and respond my comment..more power to you ma'am @indigoocean

I think some people expect to make money fast. which is possible, but it really takes 4-5 months to create a baseline on anything. I am currently working just putting in the work knowing that I may only get 1 view. I think people should view Steemit as an investment, and getting discouraged early is just silly, as they will be more upset if Steemit becomes popular.

Also, think long term as well: if you make 1 Steem a day, and it is worth $3 today, and $100 three years from now, you could think you are earning $3 a day, when in fact, you earning $100. Now that is general terms but still.

I echo your point about investing in Steem. I reinvested some of my Ether profits into Steem and I don't regret it, I think a lot more people should follow suite.

Very good point about the appreciation of STEEM over time! I enjoy following you and love how you're investing yourself in building a quality blog.

Thank you very much.

Yes, holding steem is a really good idea. Same as investing into the other large and "stable" coins. I like to split my sbd between a steem power upgrade and investments into other cryptos.

That's an interesting idea. Right now I'm just trying to get more money to put into STEEM so I can increase my SP faster, but I suppose at some point one might start sending the money the other way.... earning on Steemit to buy other crypto. Other crypto appreciates in value, but to me only STEEM both appreciates and helps you earn more of itself when it is SP.

When you say other "stable" coins, do you mean you don't want to be "all in" just on Steemit related coins?

Yeah, putting sbd etc into sp has a really great return on steemit. I don't like to put all my eggs into one basket so to speak. This is not that I'm second guessing steemit, but it is always a good investment to have diverse options. For example, I also invest in gold and silver, the new and smaller/cheaper "shit" coins, as well as powering up my steem and buying pieces of dash, monero, ripple and so on. You can do a great deal of trading on only a few sbd.