Are your posts rewards unpredictable? Did your last post not do as well as the one before that? Do you get a lot of votes one day and barely any the next? There's a reason for that called the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule is why you should keep posting content on Steemit regardless of the price of Steem or your earnings.
What is the 80/20 rule?
It's a rule that states that roughly 80% of the your results will come from 20% of your efforts.
This rule (also known as the Pareto principle, or the principle of factor sparsity, or the law of the vital few) is evident in many examples in the world.
A few examples I found on Wikipedia are:
- It is said that about 20% of sportsmen participate in 80% of big competitions and out of them, 20% win 80% of the awards.
- Occupational health and safety professionals discovered 20% of the hazards account for 80% of the injuries.
- the richest 20% of the world's population controlling 82.7% of the world's income.
- It is a common rule of thumb in business that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.
- Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most-reported bugs, 80% of the related errors and crashes in a given system would be eliminated. credit
These examples are commonly mimicked in nature.
When I built 300 WordPress sites selling everything you can possibly imagine I found that 20% of the websites earned 80% of the profit.
On any single website, 20% of the pages on that site got 80% of the traffic.
Of the pages that were earning money from sales, 20% of those pages earned 80% of the profit.
This is so common for just about any business.
This also worked in reverse where 80% of the content I created earned 20% of the profits.
So this means of any particular piece of content I created only 2 out of 10 earned substantially more than the other 8.
So what does that have to do with posting on Steemit?
If you don't understand the 80/20 rule then you may get discouraged when you make a post that earns well one day followed by another post that earns very little. This is completely normal and should not discourage you.
The successful reaction is to make another post. Understanding the 80/20 rule means you know you need to write 10 posts to get 2 to do really well.
Instead of getting disheartened from an earnings dip get enthusiastic to write a better post. The more you post good, engaging content on Steemit regardless of what the price of Steem is or how many rewards you made, the more posts you'll have and the more posts you have the more results you'll get.
Remember only 20% of your posts are going to earn about 80% of your results.
So more posts = more results.
Knowing the 80/20 rule and how it works gives you the psychological support you need to Steem on regardless of what is going on with the price of Steem or the amount of votes your post gets. It's just how the universe works baby so get over it and get on with it.
Once you have at least 100 posts the data you can extract from them will be useful to increasing your success on Steemit.
Key questions to ask yourself are:
- What are your top 20 (out of 100) posts?
- How much did they earn?
- How many views/upvotes/comments/resteems did they get?
- What are the topics of those posts about?
- What do they all have in common?
- How are they different from your other posts?
With this data, you can now fine tune your future posts, including the qualities you observed in your most successful posts. This will help build your expertise or niche and attract more genuine followers.
It will also increase your ability to engage with your audience and give them what they are most responsive to.
How Pareto's Principle Applies To Social Media
In the chart below there are some very interesting observations of the Pareto principle as it applies to Steemit and the way we interact on the platform.
As a new user looking to build their social currency on Steemit it is tempting to add links to your content in as many comments as you can.
If we look at the data though we find that those who help others on social media have better long term results.
Linking to others content when it helps their readers understand the topic better not only helps your reader but gains the favor of the author you linked to.
Linking to another Steemian's story to embellish your own post is what I call Steemweaving and is something to aspire to as a good Steemian citizen.
It builds a strong community by connecting users with common interests with each other. Acting as a conduit that binds the community serves more than just you and attracts the people that you have commonality with to you.
I have found that by adding links to others content to a comment that answers their question gets me more of a positive reaction than if I added a link to my own post.
Why that is I have no idea but there is the data to back it up.
Conclusions
The takeaway from this post is very simple. Only 2 out of 10 of your posts are really going to have an impact and knowing this helps keep you focused on writing the best content you can instead of focusing on the rewards of any single post.
In short, Steem on!
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