Today, I'd like to present my latest major undertaking, which I believe will benefit the Steemit community greatly in the coming months: The Beginner's Guide to Steemit, a plain-English guide to the Steemit ecosystem aimed at a non-Steemian audience who may be interested in joining the platform. Now I need your help.

I registered for Steemit in November of 2016. I didn't share my first blog until June of 2017.

I don't want to blame my lack of involvement on the platform itself, but I was a bit daunted by Steemit as another blogging platform. I wasn't sure how I would come up with content to blog about, and I certainly didn't expect to build relationships and network.

I've discussed my Steemit beginnings a few times along my journey, but one thing that I'm finding more and more true is that new users on the platform are becoming discouraged after joining and sharing a few blogs because of misconceptions they have about Steemit before joining, a lack of immediate financial gain, or the failure to get plugged into communities.

Welcoming New Steemians

There are countless efforts to welcome new Steemians and point them in the right directions. Recently, @inquiringtimes hosted one of the most comprehensive welcoming contests that the platform has seen to date. The result is one of the most complete index of Steemt links that I've ever found. The contest helped assemble many posts that have been written for new Steemians to guide them along the way. I encourage you to check out the final summary of the series as well as @inquiringtimes' post that contains a list of many Steemit resources, tools, and communities.

I have often made efforts to guide users along the way in many of the communities I've been involved with. It can be a trying experience, but is ultimately rewarding to see new users step up and make great contributions to the platform.

However, there's still a gigantic learning curve. As someone from the outside looking in, Steemit can seem like a strange place. I've heard stories of users telling their friends about Steemit only to hear them say it sounds like a scam, a Ponzi scheme (thanks for that one @bafi), or it seems too good to be true.

I realized that perhaps the answer to this isn't to convince them to join and then inundate them with links, but rather to provide information upfront about Steemit and mentor them along the way.

I've taken this approach with a few people whom I've met and referred to the platform, but in doing so, I realized just how much information there is to communicate, and for someone without a background in digital currencies or blogging, it becomes even more challenging.

The Beginner's Guide to Steemit

My solution is The Beginner's Guide to Steemit (BGtS). While in some aspects, it is my own flavor of a Steemit how-to guide for new users of the platform, I want the focus to be on creating a plain-English guide that explains the ins and outs of Steemit to an average person who has not joined the platform yet. While you will see the guide in posts on my blog, the goal is to format it as a PDF that may be shared easily with friends and family who are curious about Steemit. They will be able to read the guide (and register for Steemit along the way if they so choose) to get an understanding of the various aspects of being involved with a blockchain-based social network.

Once I began brainstorming for this, I realized what a gigantic undertaking it is going to be. That's why I'm going to enlist your help. Who better to ask than a community of users who were once on the outside looking in and plunged into a world they may not have understood. I want to make Steemit as easy to understand as possible for someone who has never heard of it before.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting drafts of lessons focusing on specific topics related to the STEEM ecosystem. I'll be asking for your help to provide suggestions on missing information, cleaning up the language, and polishing the explanations to make it as easy as possible for potential Steemians to learn the basics.

Covering the Steemit Basics

Back at the beginning of @inquiringtimes's Welcoming Contest, I helped create an outline of important things I think every Steemian should be familiar with. I'll be loosely following this outline for the BGtS, so I wanted to get your feedback on if there are major subjects not covered that you feel would be useful to know about Steemit before diving in. Here's the outline so far:

• The Steemit Sign-up process
• Account keys.
  • Master vs. Active vs. Owner. Public vs. Private.
  • Key storage and safety
• STEEM, STEEM Power, and SBDs.
  • What are they?
    • The Blockchain
      • Brief intro to blockchain technology
      • How Steemit uses the blockchain
  • What are the advantages of holding one vs. the others
  • How to exchange (internal and external markets)
  • Powering up vs Powering down

---

• Steemit Social Functions and Concepts
  • Voting
    • Voting power as it relates to STEEM power
    • Voting power depletion and recovery
    • The slider
  • Commenting
    • How to make meaningful comments
    • Asking questions
    • Upvoting comments
  • Resteeming
    • What is it?
    • Post's position on your blog
  • Rewards
    • The 75/25 split
    • The initial 30 minutes
  • Reputation
    • Raising and lowering reputation
    • Why is it important?
  • Following
    • When to follow someone
    • Unfollowing
  • Rank terminology
    • Whales
    • Dolphins
    • Minnows
    • Red Fish/Plankton

---

• Posting
  • Learn Markdown
    • Text formatting
    • Images and image formatting
    • Text and image links
  • Introduction Posts
    • How to make a quality introduction blog post
    • Identity verification
    • Responding to comments on your introduction post
  • Plagiarism
    • Etiquette about sharing others' content
    • Using images from external sources
      • Finding public domain, commercial use images
        • Pixabay
        • Unsplash
        • Google Image search "labeled for reuse"
      • Citing sources from copyrighted images
      • Quoting articles
    • @Cheetah and @Steemcleaners
  • Tags
    • When to use tags
    • Avoid tag abuse
  • Creating Blog Posts
    • What to write about?
    • Consider series of posts
    • Original content
      • Stories
      • Poems
      • Art
    • Commentary on news or current events
      • cite sources
    • Responses to contests
      • Memes, short stories, photography, etc.
  • Building Community on Steemit
    • Discord
    • Steemit.chat
    • Engaging others
    • Finding communities

---

• Other Steemit front-ends
  • Busy.org
  • DTube
  • DSound
  • DLive
  • Esteem
  • Utopian
  • Others

---

• Steemit's "Areas of Concern"
  • Spam accounts
    • How to spot them
    • Flagging/downvoting
  • Voting bots (bid bots and non-bid voting bots)
  • Plagiarism
  • Self-voting

---

What I Have So Far

Right now, I have drafts prepared for the following chapters/lessons:

• Introduction
• Lesson 1: Your First Steemit Experience: Signing Up, Securing Your Keys, and Checking Out Your Wallet
• Lesson 2: The Steemit Economy: STEEM, STEEM Power (SP), and STEEM-backed dollars (SBD)
• Lesson 3: The Social Aspects of Steemit (blogging, commenting, resteeming, etc.)
• Lesson 4: All About Voting
• Lesson 5: Introducing Yourself: Your First Steemit Blog Post!

This is the order I believe to be the most logical. We begin with how to register and login, talk about account security, and introduce them to the idea of a digital currency wallet. Next, we explain the Steemit economy and the relationship between STEEM, SBD, and SP. We move to social account actions, dedicate an entire post to voting mechanics, and then by Lesson 5, they are learning about intro posts before moving on to discussions of rewards, third-party services, communities, etc.

If you have suggestions on how this might be done better, I'd love to hear them! You can expect these drafts to be published soon.

Clearly, there are a lot of topics. I have drafts for the first few major bullet points, but there's still much work to be done. Please evaluate this outline and let me know in the comments if there's a topic you would add. Right now, the order in which I'm presenting the topics is fluid also. Is there an issue that I have listed as a minor point that you think should have its own dedicated lesson?

Also, if anyone has a blog post about any of these subjects already or would like to take a stab at typing up a lesson, I'm definitely open to the possibility! I'd love to make this a collaborative effort since most everyone I've talked to wishes they had a resource they could share with friends and family who are not Steemians yet. I'm hoping this will help the #promo-steem effort and eventually increase the value of the platform as a whole as we bring more excellent content creators along.

I've already taken inspiration from several communities and users, including @EnchantedSpirit, @Catweasel, @ShadowsPub, @enginewitty, @HopeHuggs, @shai-hulud, and @dreemsteem.

The first draft I'll be sharing is the introduction, which is arguably one of the most important sections as it's the first thing someone will read when opening up the guide about Steemit. I've got a bit more personal editing to do, but look for it soon. In the meantime, I'd love to hear suggestions you all have. I'll take everything into consideration. Thank you in advance for your hard work!