It's easy...(😰 groan). Only 4 simple steps (?) and Tadaaa...🎉 😀
Homeless drifters on social networks (like me) - this is how you can roost on Steemit.
My journey of social networks started with a few pecks at Facebook - which soured my beak forever and made me puke every time I saw selfies of contacts with pouted lip poses!! A few colleagues said Orkut was still 'the thing' so I even sampled living on that dead tree with dark ominous tree hollows. The characters lurking there proved incompatible. I flew on to the whirlwind whipped trees of Whatsapp and Twitter only to get inundated with irrelevant bits of 'updates' from numerous family and friends. It was like getting a deluge of rain drops - leaving me irritated and running for cover all the time!
Then I happened to notice a strange new blooming tree - it had intellectuals nesting on it and was full of tidbits of knowledge. It welcomed me with open arms and then ..... left me alone.
I hopped around, reading this and reading that. Upvoting like crazy and seeking attention. I produced a few bits of my regurgitated thoughts as my offering but found no takers...
I sat back on a branch, relaxed and contemplated life in general - on Steemit and in real. Found a lot of lessons in nature on what is needed to build a nest. That is when the journey started. Here are the steps I followed and what you can follow too if you want to build a comfy Steemit nest...
Step 1: Gather materials for good blogs....
A weaver bird gathers large amount of grass blades, palm frond strips, thin long roots etc. By my estimate, one nest with an average diameter of about 4 inches and length of about 18 inches may need more than 600 feet of grass strips.
Gathering material is not easy. It has to be ORIGINAL material. A weaver does not rip off threads from it's neighbors. It flies back and forth - locating, cutting and transporting strips of grass, for hundreds of times to gather it's material. Similarly - we need to put in effort to create something original. Depending on our passion, it could be and article, a vlog, a music piece or just about anything... As long as it is not plagiarized and is interesting, Steemians welcome all sorts of content with a voracious appetite for knowledge.
Step 2: Select your area for roosting...
The weaver bird chooses a site with care. The nest is typically built on a tree branch hanging quite a good distance from ground and preferably over water. Preferably a tree with thorns is chosen. This makes it a safe place from predators. Well, on Steemit, you do not need to worry about predators but you would want to choose an active area of interest that keeps your passion alive and is active on Steemit. As you can see from my top 10 analysis of about 1 month worth of entire voting on Steemit (based on SteemSQL server data maintained by @arcange and accounting for votes on blogs but not including votes on comments), The top areas which are not language or geographical tag based are Art, Photography, Steemit, Life and Travel etc.
Selecting a proper area with good relevance to your own passion will make your roosting area on Steemit a warm and welcome home.
For example, my passion is wildlife awareness, nature and Steemit accompanied by my own musings about life. So, I typically choose photographu, life and Steemit as my lead tags.
Step 3: Poke head out and flap wings...
Get noticed, get evaluated, guided - build relationships
The Baya weaver bird constantly advertises it's craftsmanship by poking it's head out and flapping it's wings to attract the attention of potential mates. Potential mates come, inspect the nest being built and decide to get in a relationship if they like the nest.
On Steemit, we need to interact with other bloggers, provide meaningful feedback through comments and interact through comments on our blogs, chats and events. This is the accepted form of flapping of wings on Steemit. We have to be careful not to flap wings in a offending manner of course ( avoid dropping spam links, trolling, unwelcome and uninvited intrusion on chat etc.)
If Steemians like our flapping of wings, they will naturally inspect our nests and decide to follow us. The image below shows how the Steemians will scrutinize our blog - carefully, from all angles, even upside down, like a female Baya weaver inspecting a nest.
Step 4: Keep repeating Steps 1 to 3 !
A weaver bird is known to redesign and rebuild it's nest up to 15 times before it attracts attention and gets a mate. Then it repeats this whole thing again the next breeding season. Talk about a tenacious courtship!!
Our nest on Steemit can only be stronger if we do not get discouraged by feedback or lack of upvotes, keep up our passion and keep putting in hard work even if we are reasonably successful! Steemit is a growing tree with new neighbors coming in all the time. We need to keep attracting them and keep providing great blogs for regular followers. That takes a lot of consistency and hard work.
So - Hope it all works out for everyone. Happy roosting on Steemit! Please feel free to share your own experience in comments
Note: All the pictures in this blog have been taken by me yesterday with Nikon P900.
If you liked this blog, you may like my other blogs. Please feel free to check the following latest blog:
PhotoSpeak#5: Blazing glory - Nature paints with Sunrays! 
