As a newbie, and as someone who mostly reads other people's posts rather than writes, I've been feeling how hard it is to earn a few cents on Steemit. It takes hours to write posts, and seven days later they end up worth merely around ten cents. To someone who is terrible at promoting content on social networks, this was no surprise. I never had any illusions that I would get rich on Steemit or anything. For now, I'm here mostly for the fun, to learn from other people's posts, share some experiences and try to write something useful to others. It's been fun so far. I only wish the new users' upvotes would be worth at least one cent, but unfortunately this is not how it works... it's demotivating to give an upvote to a post you enjoy greatly, only to see the post's value unchanged as though your upvote means nothing.
My latest posts have been at around ten cents, and half of which comes from @steemcenterwiki's bot that votes automatically on posts by people that collaborate by editing the Steem Center Wiki. The exception was my introductory post which ended the cycle worth $1.48. Then, on March 2nd, 2018, something totally unexpected happened, and another exception appeared!
On the afternoon of March 1st, I wrote about a tool that helps create avatars. I wrote two versions of the post, one in Portuguese and one in English. Not the longest nor the best thing I had ever written. Definitely a post I didn't expect much from. Hours went by, and at the end of the day (or rather, the beginning of the following day, as it was a little past midnight), I was about to turn off the computer, but decided to press "F5" and refresh the Steemnow page one last time before going to bed, to see how the votes were doing... only to see that a lot of upvotes had appeared on the post in Portuguese! The post was at $2.25 when I checked, and my reputation had jumped from 31 to 34. I was stunned! It was about 30 votes, most made at the same minute, less than 1% power each (but for the post to have gone above $2, that 1% must be worth a lot), and all of them came from usernames that aren't my followers and that I had never seen before. From these characteristics, I believe they have all been automated votes. Could my post have been lucky enough to fall in someone's curation trail? It was hard to believe. I was ecstatic! Could this be a sign that my other posts' visibility would also start to improve?
The answer is no. The joy ended at the realization that, meanwhile, the English version of the same article and my post about Busy.org which has much more text and took me a lot more work to write (in Portuguese and in English) are still stuck in the 10-15 cents region...
Well, the post that got a lot of votes and pushed my reputation score up was an important event to my growth on Steemit. However, I believe it was nothing more than a random occurrence and won't happen again anytime soon, since none of those users follow me, and probably won't see (let alone vote on) my next posts. I think the best thing to do is to have no expectations at all, and move on. Other surprises may or may not come. The only thing we can be sure about is that we can get there, one cent at a time. If we don't give up midway, of course.