This is a simplified version of a previous article that some readers had found to be "too heavy".
There's gold in them thar neurons!
Why are you here? Whether you like to admit it or not, you came here for the "money" (or "quasy-money")! If it wasn't for the money, you'd still lurk on Facebook or elsewhere!
Now of course you didn't expect to get free money, did you? Bitcoin isn't free, is it ? Neither is Ether. If you want bitcoin, or ether, you need to "mine". Well, why would you think getting STEEM is any different ? If you want STEEM, you need to mine too! Except here, you mine ... your brain!
Brain mining for dummies
Steemians write posts (articles) while the steem blockchain fills the "reward pool" with a mix of STEEM and SBD
Steemians "curate" (upvote and, less frequently, downvote) the posts written in 1 above
The mix of rewards from the pool is distributed to the authors that had been "upvoted" (~75%) and to those that "upvoted" (~25%)
A sharp mind would ask: "What happens to the authors that had NOT been upvoted?". Good question! They get zilch, nothing, zero, nada!
Look at these beautiful posts of mine, from an era when I had no clue:
They are long and required effort, thinking, research. Yet they brought me ... zero! Fortunately "money" was only an alibi for me because I wanted to write anyway.
But while you are writing (and reading), why not also make some "play money"? Even if it ends up being worth nothing, it's still more fun!
Advice no. 1: do NOT write!
At least do not put too much energy into writing at first as your energy is better spent differently, as I'll explain below. You can see from the above picture, writing can easily be a waste of time. You put a lot of effort in it and nobody cares. Really, go check for your self, those articles are pretty long and reek of brain juice! Yet nobody ever comes to read what you put time and love into crafting! And when you get a vote, it's from a plankton and worth $0.00. And even that vote comes after the 7 days period, when it doesn't count anymore
Advice no. 2: VOTE!
Voting is wonderful, it has a whole bunch of advantages over writing:
- it requires a LOT less effort than writing an article you won't be ashamed of.
- it draws the author's attention to your existence. It's even better if you manage to accompany the vote with a smart comment. You can easily make more from posting a good comment on the post of a whale than from a full post of yours. If, despite Advice no. 1, you did author some posts, a vote plus a comment can draw the whale to visit your blog and maybe like what he reads and drop an upvote
- it gets YOU some steem (remember the 25% of "curation rewards")!
Advice no. 3: Vote SMART!
Ok, this post has been suggested by @littlescribe. Truth is, I had written first a post in French, that I then expanded in a (big) post in english (link at the end). She offered this very valuable piece of advice:
Most people won't have the stamina to read or understand a lot of what you've put there. But the concept is pretty straightforward. Vote, or else someone else will have access to that untapped voting power. Vote after 30 minutes, or it won't count toward you. Don't vote for yourself until you've given other people a chance to vote for you first, so they can reap from the curation pool.
A few comments to clarify:
a. the reward pool is distributed whether you choose the beneficiaries (by voting) or not ! If you don't vote, you basically leave it up to all the others to decide how the money is distributed.
b. your voting power (whether it's $0.01 or $10) replenishes at the rate of 2% every 2.4 hours and never goes above 100%. If you don't vote at least that often, you are forfeiting your right to pick who gets a bit of the reward pool
c. by the way, you also forfeit some money that you'd have made yourself, thanks to the curation rewards.
Because you cannot be reading Steemit all day long, you might want to choose a tool such as Streemian.com or steemauto.com.
On the latter, go to Dashboard - Settings and set a floor below which steemauto should stop voting for you (in order to avoid it completely depleting your voting power)
Then pick "FANBASE" and on that page enter the users whose writing you are a fan of.
Then as soon as your voting power is above the threshold set out earlier, steemauto will be on the watchout for possible posts published by the authors you are fan of, and upvote them. Make sure you adjust the settings to vote on articles which are at least 30' old in order to optimize your own curation rewards.
Bonus info
If, after your vote, the rewards of the post you voted for increase significantly (perhaps thanks to voting bots), then you as curator stand to gain a lot.
Basically that's it. Give it a thought.
Here's the big post I've mentioned earlier: Best way to Grow on Steemit. If you like what you' ve read in there, consider using the trick I explain here.