Dear Steemit friends,

i'm now here for 72 days and i decided early to power-up my account as much as possible for the long term. Maybe someone ask the question why i should do that?

What is power-up in Steemit?

In many videogames you can power-up your character to increase the chances to win the game because your character get special abilities, like a longer energy bar, a shield, speed up your movement or be temporarily invincible. I think that's similar in Steemit. Important to know if a power-up is just temporarily or lasts forever.

Powering up in Steemit is permanent and not limited for a certain amount of time. Instead of collecting capsules or mushrooms you do it here with Steem Power. The abbreviation for Steem Power is SP. That is one of the three available currencies in the Steemit universe.

What's the importance of Steem Power (SP)?

SP determines your influence in Steemit. There are a few important things i recognized with higher SP:

you can give more valuable upvotes to authors
you can distribute value to more authors, because you can influence their payout still with 10% voting power. That's a great freedom of choice and also a great responsibility
your curation rewards are higher because you get a bigger share on pay date if you're participated in upvoting on popular content
you can catch more attention because you give visible value to authors and so more recognized Steemians possibly vote for your posts
you're more committed and recognized because powering down is a time consuming process instead of instant exchanging the liquid Steem Dollars

Where can i get it?

There are basically two ways:

directly via exchange
indirectly via post and curation rewards

As i recognized these two options and further subsets of the 2. option for the first time i was amazed. Because both are total viable options as i experienced.

1. directly via blocktrades.us
You can exchange SP via BlockTrades. The very easy to handle service is my recommendation if you wanna buy SP directly because it's an integrated service with your wallet of Steemit. If you look at the picture below there are just a few simple steps to realize a transaction.

which currency you wanna give in exchange for SP.. ETH in this case
the currency you'll get, SP in the case
referencing your account (check correct username!)
push the button to get the receiving adress for the currency you give to exchange
send to the receiving adress (see 4.)

That's all. Each time i used the service it was convenient and fast, not complicated trading, currency handling. Just send any amount of the selected currency to the generated receiving adress and dependend on the blocktime in the end you'll see the SP in your account under "Wallet" -> "Balances".

2. indirectly via post and curation rewards
Each time you get a payout for a post you'll get at least 50% of your author rewards in SP or you can also choose before publishing to get 100% in SP. If you are a highly paid poster you can easily power up in a short amount of time without using option number one. The same is valid for valuable comments. If you're specialized on commenting the posts of others it can be the catalayst for your power-up.

The beauty for me is you can always choose which one is the right option. That is one reason why it think Steemit is a long term success.

What is my approach while constantly powering up?

I think there is no shortcut around that, so i wanna explain my intention a bit longer to give also newcomers a sense what's going on here and maybe recognized Steemians a chance to reply and give a few more valuable hints on this topic form their perspective so i hope. As i grossly understood the system behind Steemit it was absolutely clear to me that i had to do the following things to build a win-win-Situation:

1. build up a high quality blog with posts where i put my whole heart in

That's so important for me to build a uniqe place for Steemit where visitors can find valuable information, from initially cryptospace related information up to more entertainment, motivation, art topics which i'm interested in and maybe also many others. I put always a lot work into my posts. Sometimes i cancel a post if i'm not satisfied with the result or think it has too less value. My initial goal was to post 1 post per 2 days which equals about 180 posts per year. While writing for about a month i recognized i can do more because i have enough to say. There is also a motivating app called Steemitboard which visualizes your progress on Steemit with very nice looking award graphics in different categories like number of posts, comments, weekly and monthly author. Especially for newbees it's a nice service because with your first post or upvote you get your first medals like achievements in a videogame. Since 4 weeks i'm constantly publishing posts each day and plan to do for the rest of my existence here. Currently i wanna reach the monthly author on Steemitboard and that's a challenge. But i like challenges because they are great fun for me!

What's the outcome of the effort?

with each post i can improve myself, get new ideas, researching new ways to put value in my posts
get a daily routine to write great blog posts in less time
payout grows because with each post there is a chance that somebodies attention is caught in the feed

2. read, comment, upvote the posts of others

From the beginning here i read other posts. Each time i see a title with a interesting topic i open and read it and if it touches me i comment from my experience and knowledge to enhance the post and upvote it. For me it's important not just to read the posts of people with high reputation over 60, but also posts with reputation of 25 (newcomers) and sometimes also of someone who was flagged because maybe he did stupid things once and regret it now or due a false positive or simply is bashed by a group of haters he unintentionally offended.

Why commenting and upvoting does matter?

you give value (payout amount) to others who put a lot of work in their posts with your comment which can lead to little discussions and reveals even more valuable informations and can push a post payout further
you get paid for valuable comments which are more like "Good!" or "nice picture!". If you write something connected to the topic, with fun and creativity it is often also fun and value for others and if someone is touched or smiled while reading your comment it is probable you get a upvote, sometimes from someone with massive voting weight (i dive into that topic later)
number of replies are visible in the feed, the more replies to a post the attention is payed for that post in combination with the $ amount.
upvotes generate Steem Dollars and Steem Power (SP) for the author and the voter!

Especially that last point is why i will further power-up my account

3. power-up my SP as much as i can

Steem Power or SP are a measure of influence on Steemit. The more SP you have the more you can give to others and at same time you increase the chances to get something back. Imagine the impact of someone who constantly gives to others, ask the question how this person is recognized, what do you think?

..constantly giving to others.. how this person is recognized?

It is possible that a giver never get something back because there is no contract written for getting something back. The decision is always on the receiver.. of an upvote, a comment, a donation (yes you can also donate directly via your wallet if you want), mention a user in your post combined with a positive event,.. there are many ways to give on Steemit. I have just a strong belief that constantly giving value to others result in great outcome for all people!

..strong belief that constantly giving value to others result in great outcome for all..

But i focus on the amount of SP here. The more SP you have the higher is your influence on the payout of another author. For example you read a excellent post, you're so touched and want give the author something back for his efforts. Imagine the following cases:

I have 27 SP which i got with my registration and give the author with the excellent post a full upvote with 100% available voting power (best case is 100% but often smaller maybe 80 or 90%)
I have 3,179 SP (my current amount) and give my full upvote

In the second case my voting weight (if you look in steemd.com you see that description for SP) is more than 100 times higher than as new registered user in my case. As i started here that was my scenario. So what happens now in the both scenarios?

after the upvote the counter of upvotes increases by 1 and the payout in $ increases by 0
upvotes counter increases also by 1 but the payout increases by about $0.40! with a full upvote (currently)

And that is one main reason because i wanna have influence what's good, i wanna shape the future of Steemit to be a very successful platform and to profit with the community in the long term! I learned that from investing in companies, my own with my blood and sweat and others via stocks.

The dark side

But there is also another reason i learned from @lukestokes and @barrydutton. There are times it needs people to defend a platform against evil forces

In my short time here i experienced the following bad events:

bots starting to spam accounts with senseless messages and try to get upvotes and Steem Dollars for their information garbage
locked accounts or blacklisted users try to restart the bad activities under a new username
users got flagged by haters or groups of haters because they did one wrong step

That's the second important reason for me to have the strength to help the community in times when it's necessary. The SP combined with high reputation (the latter is not the topic here) is important for flagging users who have obviously bad intentions and also support projects with valuable upvotes for financing. @cheetah is such a valuable bot, which avoids copycats or copyright abuses as good as he can. They are not perfect, i had my first false positive in one of my posts but believe all in all the bot does a great job!

What's the fundamental value of Steemit?

My vision is that Steemit grows to a platform which motivates many people who are today not in the the social media scene because of the lack of value for them.. by just publishing valuable information which is collected by companies just for their own purposes without getting any value back. I think that's also the cause that many platforms are just used for smalltalks, bits of invaluable information or simply not supporting a lasting community with high values. Steemit could overcome the lack of value on both sides.

enhance the internet with valuable information from people who are currently simply not in the market and also help converting people from other platforms
distribute value under contributers so they have additional income or sometimes make a living out of it

I think it's wonderful to have such ecosystem in the blockchain which gives people a voice which are else powerless because they don't have the money to influence or others which don't wanna participate in a system without getting value back. On Steemit you can simply put in valuable content and get something back and can become a whale in the long term. Even if you have just a talent for writing, telling a touching story, make a scientific explanation, write about the sense of music or anything else. Here you'll find a community of people which are encouraged and incentivized to do great things to give real value for value.

STEEM ON!

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