I got complacent.
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Yes, I know it's hard to believe but I did. Just a few weeks into this gig and I pulled back, stop putting in the effort, and my payouts suffered from it for a bit. In fact, unless something happens, today's payout flatout sucks, here's why!
I was doing four posts a day, but have dropped off to 3, then 2, thinking that would work.
- I wasn't getting them in on time.
- I had other work,
- so it was easy to use that as an excuse for not doing what I knew needed to be done.
So, here's my plan to get back on track!
- Be more consistent in getting up my four posts a day. I think it built a lot of traffic, because I was always in the feeds of my followers, which are getting more crowded.
- Make sure to take the time to contribute to others daily in upvotes, comments and encouragement.
- Use the "reblog" tool judiciously to bring more value to the site.
Today, I got a comment that caused me to panic a bit, unnecessarily.
The comment was that they had decided to go ahead with the 5 vote limit, starting two hours before the comment, so the writer could not upvote me.
I let that get inside my head. I started looking for evidence that this had happened. I became fearful of losing the gig altogether.
- Once you panic, things start to look bad.
- You see low payouts everywhere and start to think that the doom and gloom is real.
- This demotivates you, spinning your day out of control, making you less productive and destroying creative impulse!
You become your own self fulfilling propechy.
So, I took a breather. Just walked away from the computer.
Went and fixed some doors for a client and took my wife out to dinner at a nice restaurant, (even though I was tempted to be cheap, since my payouts weren't good today) and then came back with fresh eyes.
Here's what I found!
According to @Masteryoda there was a dip in payouts, but today's payouts were up over yesterday's
There are recent posts at the top of trending with more than $1000 each. No mega payouts, but they're way ahead of me.
There are fiction posts with nice payouts today, and if they can do it, so can I.
So, this is just to encourage you to make your plan and stick to it. Even a bad plan is better than no plan and my plan was: Two to three fiction posts a day, one non-fiction post each day (Steemit Ninja) and Dolphinschool posts as I thought of something to add.
As long as the opportunity exists, I know that if I put in the work to build the audience and relate to them, and produce quality content (I don't know how to do anything else) then I'll have some great days, some okay days and a few crappy days here and there.
The thing, I think, that you should take away from this is: Don't blame the system if you're not doing the work it took to make your initial success happen! So, expect more from me, now onto the vote rumors!
THERE HAS BEEN NO CHANGE TO VOTING POWER YET!
So, please vote for me! All you want! I think theb current limit is still 40 votes daily at 100%, with voting power recharging every 5 days. But correct me if you know better.
I tested my own votes by randomly upvoting 21 consecutive trending posts this afternoon, with no loss of voting power. So, I'll be limping a bit for a day or so, but I couldn't figure out how to get the information any other way!
We need a central platform of some sort to put out information about things like this.
Not just a whale, or witness, or even founder's profile. Not everyone
follows that and it's not central enough to be seen by everyone. This
rumor effected behavior today and I'm sure cost me votes and payout.
(it was still my fault for not doing the work, though!)
So, what about this reblogging tool?
First, here's a few things I heard about it.
- A Reblog share does not count against your four posts for the day, it is not a new post.
- Authorship rewards still go back to the original poster, no matter how many times it's been reblogged.
- The reblogged post will show up in your blog and in your follower's feeds, so choose wisely, you cannot unblog it.
The goal is two fold, to allow you to curate a newsfeed you think is useful, and to gain more exposure for the original writer!
So, here is what I would ask. If you like my stories, please help me
out by reblogging them. Thanks! I'll return the favor from time to
time, but don't want to clog my feed with two many at once.
So, there was a hardfork today, but in absence of a central bulletin board, I have no idea what changes were made. Anyone else know?