Also posted as is to Christa...

Hi Crista, as a plankton myself, here's what I've learned so far...
There are basically 2 ways to approach this:

Money, money, money
Use money to gain money. Buy SBD from exchange to power up your account. You could then do any or all of the following:

• self upvote yourself. However this is frown upon and some whales could flag you down, making your overall account in jeopardy.
• join a curation trail. Some will have a minimum SP requirements to join, thus the need to power up.
• bid bots. This is the most famous, and widely used here on steemit. Still frown upon, but quite acceptable. However, becareful in taking the actions, there are bots that flag bid bots (yes, it's confusing in the bots world). Many bots also return negative ROI. Try checking the steembottracker.com for the bots' ROI. If you are trying to go with bid bots, I would suggest you to do research on WhaleShares and MinnowBooster.

Build human followers
This is the hard and long way. It really takes time and effort, and we might be "burnt out" by seeing zero view or zero money on our posts day in day out. However, this is the "clean" way and in the long term, the most profitable way. If you want to take this method, here are some things that I've learned:

• transfer your followers from other social media. If you have tons of followers from youtube / facebook / etc, ask them to signup with steemit.
• comment other people's posts, don't beg for "follow to follow", but comment people's posts with the same interest as yours. Hopefully, with fingers crossed, they will also follow you. Some dolphin level people suggested this way of doing things, so I think it's quite possible to do.
• join supportive communities. In a big "ocean" like steemit, it's always better to swim together. Help people and make friends in communities and of course, friends follow one another. Friends will likely to upvote your articles. Basically being a good person and a good friend.

If you haven't joined any community, I would like to suggest 2 communities for you.

1. Minnow Support Project / PAL net. It's on Discord. Join here https://discord.gg/HYj4yvw. It's a very good support communities. No link dumps, no vote to vote, no follow to follow. It embraces the make-friend-help-one-another movement. There are many "rooms" inside the server, read the pinned posts on each rooms (they are different room by room) and you will see how they operate and how you can make friends. E.g. @danielsaori, the one posted above for the Steemit Comment Challenge is one of the good guys and one of the influential members of MSP/PAL. :D
2. The Writers' Block. This is a from writers to writers for writers community. It is open to public, but you need to go through their screening process to join. They are looking for same minded people, writers, not link dumpers. You can ask around about TWB inside PAL.

Hope that helps