My general résumé upfront
- It's hard for new content creators to be seen and to get known.
You have to be well connected and know the right people in addition to creating unique, high quality content (or get lucky to get upvoted or even resteemed by a huge whale account). - The Steemit platform is OK for investing and generating passive income.
Two great ways I found for selling (delegating) Steem Power for a limited time or selling your votes:
smartsteem.com
minnowbooster.com - Curation rewards are relatively low with my amount of Steem Power, so I'll keep focussing on creating content myself and selling my votes / delegating Steem Power for income. Of course I'm also not stingy about my votes and give manual upvotes for good content here and there.
steemworld.org stats:
| Date | Reputation | Followers | Following | Posts | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20.04.2018 | 49.406 | 277 | 343 | 29 | 170 |
Now let me tell you about my first 50 days in detail
After my account finally got verified on March 2nd 2018, I was eager to explore and try the Steemit platform.
DLive Streaming
My first 4 posts were Gaming Live Streams on the @dlive platform. I played Heroes of the Storm, which isn't even very popular on the number one streaming site twitch.tv, and unsurprisingly received 0 upvotes.
So I was even more pleasently surprised about my 2 DLive streams after that, where I switched to the more popular game Hearthstone and was upvoted by DLive for around $ 10 respectively $ 13! That immediately boosted my reputation from 25 to first 36, then 42, made the post more visible and got me a few more votes worth a few cents.
I was happy but thought I was undeserving. My stream's quality was quite low in my opinion - no webcam, no fancy stream overlay graphics or transition scenes, no real entertainment other than a few educational comments here and there, no optimized video quality. So I thought maybe my documenting of OBS settings or the well structured Steemit post was the reason for DLive's generosity...only to find out that my two streams after that went unnoticed by DLive, back to only 1 vote each. I don't want to sound ungrateful, but I guess my expectations were too high at that point.
After an issue with the platform and the generally low bandwidth streaming servers, I temporarily lost my motivation in streaming and started exploring other possible topics to write content about.
Philosophy, Photography, Tutorial
I see myself as an all-round talent and so I easily found something to write about to expand the range of my blog's topics.
Enjoying and appreciating the little things / Slowing Down
So this was my first article, a personal, philosophical photo story. I was kind of proud of it, comparing it to most of the other related content on Steemit. It was a bit short, but ok for starting and trying things out. It got 4 votes (including my own) and 1 comment, worth less than 1 cent after curation.
Disillusioned, not feeling rewarded for my effort, I turned back to improving my DLive stream by using a camera. Since I didn't own a webcam, I researched how to use my phone or tablet for that purpose. Then I shared my success and created a step-by-step tutorial, straight to the point, fast and easy.
How to: Use your Android device as camera with OBS
It received 4 votes, one of them for about 30 cents, which is nice, as well as 3 comments.
#introduceyourself, Still Learning How Things Work
So now that I had a small variety of topics on my blog, I decided to write my own introduceyourself article. Maybe this would attract some followers and get more people interested in my work.
It seemed that my wishful thinking of being able to post articles and getting organic votes and comments was too unrealistic.
I started trading votes and followers on SteemEngine, which helped me a bit but I found the trade statistics numbers to be too little transparent.
Now I still received little to no organic votes, but at least there was some life going on in the comment section and the paid votes at least made the article a little more visible.
5k views on reddit - 500 views on steemit - 0 votes?!
I even made a small experiment to see how well my tutorial was received by the reddit community compared to Steemit - the result was devastating.
The Turnaround? Did I get a hang of things yet?
After that, it was time for a longer article. I started using busy.org - the largest and most feature-rich alternative to Steemit.
Freedom, Friends and Love. A 600 km Roadtrip to Italy
1600 words, 8 minute read. It covered many topics from travel tips over love story to philosophy and more. I was exhausted and proud of my writing. Additional to the vote trading, I got some big organic upvotes (64 votes, $ 4.94 total) and 8 comments. Not bad.
Happy Easter (in a non-religious sense)
A seemingly well crafted text mixture about religion, philosophy, photography, art and life.
Thanks to @sndbox, @sndbox-alpha and @fingersik, a buddy I met through DLive streaming Heroes of the Storm, this article received the 2nd highest value in unpaid votes (181 votes, $ 7.76 total), after the @dlive votes.
After The Vacation
I was using voting bots (steembottracker.com) by now to promote some of my posts as well as commenting on articles with similar topics to my last article.
[Gardening] Planting And Growing Pumpkins Day 1
I paid for quite many votes on this article (total 163 votes, $ 17.27), but there were also some organic votes as well as comments, due to my engagement commenting on related articles and promoting organic votes and comments that way.
By the way, the pumpkins are growing already, so you can look forward to a new gardening article soon.
Next Level DLive Streaming
In light of the upcoming Hearthstone expansion, I strategically posted a short bragging article:
Unhumble Bragging - a short compilation of my notable victories
My stream at expansion launch day got my biggest DLive upvote so far (20 votes, $ 19.37 total) and at least one viewer who I could engage with almost in real time through the stream chat.
Witchwood Pack Opening & Deck Building
That felt so rewarding that I decided to get a dedicated streaming webcam and to improve my stream further. I even got another upvote by @dlive on one of the following streams. When I have time, I'm eager to stream again and provide an even better quality broadcast.
- OBS output settings work great with the new DLive streaming server
- Optical enhancements: still a lot to do, but I started using scene transition screens for a better viewer experience
- Triple streaming to DLive, Twitch and YouTube via restream.io and nginx
I'll post more details on that in an upcoming tutorial. Hopefully this will give DLive more exposure on other platforms and get new users interested in both DLive and Steemit.
Health and Hiking
Placebos are dangerous!
Risky topic and even riskier attempt of drawing a comic. I was never good at painting and don't really do it...ever...but excuses don't make it better I guess. ;-)
At a certain degree of ugliness you can start calling it art. - @spreadfire1
[Hiking] Nockstein: Easy, Unhurried, Short
As I will be hiking a lot with my girlfriend this year, you can expect some more articles like that. :-)
Mostly paid upvotes with a few organic ones in the single digits on my last two articles.
So I will use this data to improve further and continue keeping my head up, staying positive through everything. :-)
Tips How To Succeed On Steemit
This may sound funny from a guy who didn't really succeed yet himself, but these are my two cents:
- Write good quality content. There's no way around that.
- Be engaged in the community, comment and upvote good content.
- Participate in contests. Use the right tags.
- Promote your articles using voting bots: steembottracker.com
I'll buy votes for this one too, so upvote and comment to get a piece of the curation cake. - Keep working on yourself. One of the strongest skills to have is to recognize your own mistakes and weaknesses and improve upon them!
Opinions, Experiences
What do you think it takes to become bigger, maybe even a dolphin or a whale one day?
Did you have similar experiences in your first 50 days?
Let me know in the comments below and let's discuss! :-)