There is one simple, but potentially non-obvious, rule to earning your first round of followers on Steemit:
You might think that putting out the absolute best content and trying to promote it is the way to gaining followers, but you still face the problem of having no audience. You can try an "If you build it, they will come" approach, but it's simply a lot more efficient to take your product to where the people already are - the "Hot" posts of the most popular authors on Steemit.
I can't stress enough how much more efficient comments are for gaining followers than posts. Even now, at over 1500 followers, I regularly gain 2-3 followers for a quality post, and 20-40 followers for a spirited comment-discussion in a top Steemian's blog.
Before you start, double check that your blog is setup - quality content posted, avatar (especially important, make sure it is visibly differentiated from others), cover image, tag line, location.
Without further ado, here are some guidelines to remember.
You should generally try to be positive at first. I am not saying you need to become a sycophant, and if kyriacos is out there somewhere, I think he'll at least agree with me that I am not endorsing that. However, complaints from strays that just wandered in are not universally loved. Be sure any objections you make are rock-solid and be ready to defend them without falling back on logical fallacies, particularly the dreaded ad-hominem or straw-man.
If you can't be nice, you MUST be right. Remember, everything you say on Steemit will live in the block-chain. Be sure you are willing to stand by your words once the heat of "battle" has subsided. The feeling of re-reading and being embarrassed by one's own words is not a pleasant one.
If you add too many users to your feed, it will quickly become an untenable chore to look through, and you will stop using it. This may be inevitable, but try to avoid it as long as possible.
Keep your feed usable by only following those:
- That you interact with regularly
- Those whose posts you particularly like.
- Those who author posts that you can provide great value in the comments for.
- Those who have authored posts you have had great success in previously.
This is another key reason why keeping your feed clean (and free of serial resteemers) early is so critical. It really helps to have a single page you can refresh regularly to see new posts immediately.
However you do it, find a system that works for you to keep on top of the posts where you can provide the most comment value. This is going to require a lot of time for most, and there's no easy way around that.
Note that you can mute someone that a user you otherwise like following resteems too often, and then not see those resteems in your feed.
"Trending" is usually too late to have substantial active discussion ongoing, however it can be useful to find out who has been posting reliably popular articles in the last week. Sticking to the "Hot" section and sorting by tags where you can add value is your best bet. The more value, the better, but if you are forced to move on to more generic pastures, aim for the most popular tags - Steem, Steemit, etc.
Try to take advantage of your specialties and knowledge. Don't follow whales into tags you are not an expert in, or better yet, don't open up your mouth (in the non-inquisitive sense) if you don't know what you are talking about. Heck, while we're on that topic, don't ask others to answer your questions in the comments if they are Google-able - look them up and post the answer for others!
Find anywhere your abilities allow you to post faster and better than others, increasing the chance you get near the top of the comments list, and do so.
Ask yourself, if I was this author's assistant, how could I add value in the comments as they exist currently? Then do that, repeatedly, and ask for nothing back. Are there questions that need answering? Did the author ask for discussion? Would a line by line agreement or rebuttal provide useful talking points? Did the author wish had had data or research he was unable to produce or find?
This will be controversial, and indeed, this is dangerous and conditional advice. But I will simply tell you that having tried it both ways, there is simply no comparison in results. I rarely need to use this tool anymore, but the smaller I was, the more often this was critical to a comment's success via increasing visibility.
Even a small upvote that provides under 1 cent in rewards will get you above many other comments (specifically, all those with 0 votes). Many popular posts have a sea of bot, spam, and low-effort comments; if you do not self-vote ever, you will be beneath them unless the author or someone with arguable OCD comes along, reads until the very last comment, and then upvotes you. Comments with the same value, if not sorted, are ordered by reputation, further handicapping new users. The end result of an arbitrary rule to never self-vote your quality comments is that, unless you are one of the first 3-5 comments on a Hot post, your comment work will go unrewarded.
Few will notice minnow self-votes, and frankly, I personally do not care at all where the rewards on a post or comment come from. If the comment seems fairly rewarded in the context of its quality and location, the source should be irrelevant. Anything less is some degree of appeal to authority, and what constitutes "fairly rewarded" is subjective.
Having said that, flags are not an impossibility, but nobody will launch a campaign against a minnow over a few self-voted comments.
This is yet another reason why buying some SP when you start at Steemit can be very helpful. However, do not use this to reward comments unjustly - use this power to order comments in descending order of quality, hopefully placing it where yours can be seen.
Importantly, do not forget to also reward the quality comments of others.
Every user will have to judge for themselves what is acceptable. I try to judge the comment thread from as objective a point of view as I can muster, and if I must upvote my comment (note: something I do well under 1% of the time) because the comment thread is already large, I attempt to move it up only as far as its quality dictates. I try to avoid muscling off the top comment, either - I generally aim no higher than #2. The rest of the audience can move my comment up, if they so choose.
On this point in particular, please be judicious and careful. If someone wrote a post highlighting your vote, could you defend it?
If you are in doubt on this point, please feel free to open it up for discussion in the comments.
In part 4, I'll share a comment that, while it might appear initially to be a throwaway, was actually a very carefully crafted and successful comment that garnered me some 40+ followers and $20+ in rewards.
We also have a Radio Station! (click me)
...and a 4800+ user Discord Chat Server! (click me)
Sources:@dollarvigilante, Pinterest, AZQuotes
Copyright:RealMonstrosities.com, @chdasher on Linkedin, White House Press Photo, europosters.eu, Freelancer's Union Blog