You still don't get it, do you?

Listen to me. Listen. I'm going to put it in quotes so there's no way you'll misunderstand:

You will never, ever, ever ever ever EVER - not in a million billion years - make any respectable amount of money on this platform. You'll never be able to quit your job and create content here full time. Even buying paid upvotes at a profit will only have you making $50/day, tops. There's only so many large accounts that are selling them.

If you're going to stick around this place and continue to contribute, you need to change your expectations. You see those numbers at the bottom of my post? Probably says a couple hundred bucks. They're fake. It's not real. That's my money down there. It came out of my wallet, went to a upvote bot's account, and then went back to my post.

It's like me going up to you and saying, "Hey, here's $100. I'm going to go talk to that group of people over there. When we're in the middle of a conversation, come over and give me back the $100. Cool?"

Look, if you're going to stick around here you need to get this through your thick skull: you are never going to make any money here. If you do, it'll be beer money at best. It won't be consistent, either.

And if by some miracle you DO get on the good side of these mysterious Steemit Gods and they end up obsessively upvoting your posts regularly, it'll be just that: a miracle.

Hooh! Good God. What is it gooooood for..

That said, this platform is still good for something: exposure. And as a writer, that's priceless. Not just for your own ego, but because someday your actual dream should be to get brands to pay you for mentioning their stupid product in your article.

For example, I write about cryptocurrencies. Well, normally I do. I haven't posted an article in a couple days because my last post about how Steemit is rigged kind of made me depressed. And I ran out of modafinil. But I'll probably get back on the horse today and crank out a couple more.

Anyway, the point is that now that I've established myself as an "influencer" on this platform, I can add it to the list of selling tools I use when I approach a client. When I can post links to 20 articles that I've written on their industry, they think to themselves, "hmm, maybe this guy is legit." When they have to decide between hiring me or the faceless brand with a generic website and vague promises, who do you think they're going to choose?

Doesn't matter that my banner says, "SEND NUDES" or that my profile picture is a deep fried meme. Brands don't care about that. All they care about is their bottom line. How are you going to help them make money?

What I'm getting at here is that if you want to use Steemit to creatively express yourself via blog posts, videos, live streaming or whatever, forget about ever making a dollar from it directly.

Don't waste your time commenting on anyone's posts just because you think it will help other people find you. That's stupid and a luxury for people who have way more time and money than you do.

By the way I'm in a hostel right now and there's some girl eye-fucking the shit out of me so it's hard to concentrate. Gonna do my best though. Never knew typing 100+ WPM could be such a turn on.

ANYWAY. The point is that... shit what was my point. Okay, right, so my point is that... damn it... um... something something exposure... writing... oh, okay. Right.

The way you should use this platform is, get ready for it, how the designers actually intended: to create quality content that people actually want to consume because it's entertaining. If you do that, you'll get people who follow you because they like the art you produce, not because they're trying to entice you into a reciprocal back-scratching agreement.

Once you do that enough times and have established a readership of a few thousand engaged followers, then you'll be able to approach brands with yet another selling tool. Yes, it requires more work than just posting retarded comments and low effort shitposts, praying that the Steemit Gods smile upon you with a $17 upvote. But in the long run you'll make more money and there will be a higher likelihood of you being able to quit your job to work full time from your computer, like I do.

It's the same on other platforms as well. YouTube is a perfect example. With the proliferation of ad-blockers, Creators barely make any money from embedded ads like they used to. The ad blocker just blocks them.

The only way Creators are going to make any money is by inserting ads into the body of their video. The problem is that most of them are whiny little bitches and too lazy or stupid to approach brands with that kind of offer.

No participation trophies in a popularity contest

The MOST attractive thing to companies is an influencer who already has an existing audience. The understanding is that the audience implicitly trusts the influencer, so when they suggest a product or service, people are more likely to purchase it and not just brush it off like they would a banner ad or something.

Why do you think brands line up to court celebrities? Celebrities are the kings of the influencer game. They're famous from movies, television, rapping, playing basketball or whatever, and they get hit with sponsorship offers where they get paid more for a few promos than most of us make in a year. Even that "Cash me ousside, howbow da" girl got a record deal as a rapper. She's got over a million followers on IG now. Just for being herself on Dr Phil.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

So how does this relate to Steemit? Well, sadly it means that you're going to actually have to put in a little work to either become an interesting person or at least make people believe you are. Since that's unlikely to happen, it's probably better to take the more boring approach and just create content around a particular topic.

The reason I chose cryptocurrency was because of a conversation I had one day with a friend of mine. He told me that he had a friend who was paying people $25 for articles about various things. At the time, I had just quit my job and had no income from freelancing. $25 per article sounded pretty good, especially when you're a 100+ WPM typing machine like yours truly.

I told him so, and he goes, "$25 is nothing. He charges clients $100 per article."

Fuuuuuuuuck. Really? Companies are actually paying $100 per article to put on their website? I couldn't believe it.

Then I thought about it... if this guy is paying $25, and companies are paying $100, then that means that these articles are worth somewhere between $25 - $100 on the open market. So instead of writing them for someone else, why don't I just write them myself?

I wouldn't be getting paid outright for them, but if they're that valuable to companies, then there must be some value in me doing it and just putting my name on it.

They'll let anybody on CNN

Honestly, I didn't really understand why I was doing it at the time, but I figured if I wanted to start marketing my services to blockchain startups, it would probably be a good idea to establish myself as an "expert" or at the very least, a talking head.

Fast forward a few months and it's definitely paid off. I used to send out cold emails to blockchain startups. Before I had any articles written, the response would be lukewarm at best. As soon as I started including samples of my writing, the response rate skyrocketed.

And I'm assuming you guys have seen my articles. I put 20 links to them at the end of every post. They're full of memes and jokes, definitely not the type of thing you'd expect from a legitimate company where people wear suits to work and have lunch at designer food trucks. Yet here they are, paying me thousands of dollars a month to represent them in various degrees via social media, blog management and other forms of marketing.

So how do you use this to your advantage?

Sadly, you're going to need a little money to start with. Those of you who think you can start with nothing on this platform and magically be discovered by the Steemit Gods need a wake up call. It's not gonna happen unless you're smokin hot or have a legitimately interesting life, and I'd put money on the fact that if you've read this far in the article, you're neither of those things.

Besides, if you were then you'd probably already be famous on another social platform and not need this advice anyway.

Anyway, you're going to need some money. The way this platform works is that the posts with the most engagement (and highest value upvotes) get pushed to the Trending page, which is where you want to be. Why do you want to be there? Because those posts are effectively "stickied" for a few days, meaning that everyone from mindless upvote-hunters to bored housewives to normal internet people will be more likely to find them and engage with them.

Nobody cares what you think if you're a broke loser

Now the sad part is that in order to get there, you need to spend a little dough. Notice how none of the top posts on the Trending page are worth less than a few hundred bucks? That's because the Million Dollar Steemit Algorithm is designed to assume that posts that are upvoted by high value accounts are themselves, high value pieces of quality content.

While we know this is total bullshit, the fact remains that this is what will get you to the front page. Based on my [limited] experience, you need a minimum of $50 SBD in paid upvotes in order to get to the Trending page. This is excluding resteems, which we'll go over later.

For paid upvotes, I use Steem Bot Tracker. There might be a better site to find paid upvotes, but I don't know about it. If there is, please let me know.

Anyway, here's a few tips on using the bots over there:

Try and have the paid upvote execute within 30 minutes of posting in order to avoid the 25% curation fee

Trust me, you don't want to give any of these "curators" 25% of your reward, especially when you're the one footing the bill for the paid upvotes anyway. Your post is not going to get to the front page because some "curator" gives you a $1.40 upvote for your masterpiece. Your post is going to get there because you spent $8 SBD on resteems and $50 SBD on paid upvotes. Why split that profit?

Always use the vote calculator to see if the vote will be profitable (or at least break even)

I not using this when I first started buying paid upvotes. I lost a lot of money by not using it. It's not exact, but it will give you a rough idea if you're flushing money down the toilet or not.

Don't use vote bots that vote posts older than 3.5 days old

This is because @grumpycat, an extremely high SP Steemit God, does not like it and will slap you with a downvote if you break his rules. I don't feel like learning about whether or not this is justified because there's nothing I can do about it anyway and I'd rather just not deal with it.

That said, when I was first playing with upvotes, I used whatever bot I wanted and never had any problems. It wasn't until I started spending bigger money on paid upvotes that I got hit with a warning. Maybe once I hit the Trending page? I dunno.

Once you've gotten your paid upvotes all lined up, you want to get some resteems as well. There are a lot of resteem services out there that will basically promote your post to their followers. To be fair I haven't done any due diligence on these resteem bots to see if their followers are actually legit, but I will say that since having starting using their service, I get more upvotes and comments on my posts.

Yo uhhh ... lemme get uhhh... some paint chips

This in and of itself doesn't mean much because most of the comments are of the paint-chip-eating variety, but I believe the Million Dollar Steemit Algorithm takes that into account (along with total value of upvotes) when deciding if/where to place you on the Trending page. That alone is worth it.

I'm not going to list the resteem bots that I use. You can just check my wallet history for that information. Ugh... fine.. here:

@sportic
@hottopic
@resteem.bot
@resteembot
@talhadogan
@booster007
@raise-me-up
@hugo4u

I'm sure there are more, those are just the ones that I know about. If anyone knows of more, please let me know.

So how much is all of this wonderful shit going to cost you? Let's figure it out.

Ideally, you should be posting at least once every other day. And that's the bare minimum. When you get a little cred and people actually recognize your name as a decent content creator, you can slow it down a little bit. But in the beginning you need to pull out the big guns and hit them with that good shit.

You're competing with so much for attention these days that you need to stay visible. I've said it before, but your biggest problem as a business, influencer, celebrity, whatever is obscurity. You don't need to be the best, you just need to be visible.

Posting once every other day will give you a chance to do that.

Now, all of this wonderful, free advice that I've given you precludes the fact that you are creating content with some actual value and not just pictures of you eating cereal. Unless you're a semi-attractive girl with strong opinions and a stupid haircut. Then you can do whatever you want and people will kowtow to you anyway because they're thirsty little upvote-hunters.

So back to the point: how much will it cost? Let's do some math:

$50 - $100 SBD to upvote each post x 4 posts per week = $200 - $400 SBD
$5 - $7 SBD for reseteems x 4 posts per week = $20 - $30 SBD

So let's split the difference and say $320 SBD, which at the time of this writing is roughly about $1200 USD. Now, most of this money you recoup in the form of SP and SBD when you claim your author rewards after 7 days. But plan for some losses, especially in the beginning when you're just figuring out how to work the system.

Which brings me to my next point...

Don't be a little bitch

Before doing any of this, you need to ask yourself: what's the point? Not in the fatalistic French latte-sipping cigarette-smoking "life is meaningless" way, but from a practical sense.

Why are you here? Money, obviously.

Why do you want the money from Steemit, specifically? Because you hate your job and want to work from your computer on a tropical beach somewhere. Duh.

In order to make that happen you need to expand your mind. Don't be so fucking lazy that you think this or any magical platform is going to pay you just to create content for them.

You are your own brand. You, the person reading this, the average looking nobody with a boring life that will die without making an impact on the world, can be famous in whatever industry you choose. All you have to do is write something semi-intelligent and send a few emails.

It'll take some time. You'll have to engage in that painful activity called "thinking" that nobody seems to like doing these days. But so what? I'll gladly think from my hostel in Thailand with a bunch of hot slutty European girls before I go train Muay Thai and spend a few hours on the beach working on my tan.

Meanwhile you're suffering through winter in your boring office while you work on those reports that your boss wants on his desk by Wednesday afternoon or some shit.

All you have to do is think a little bit. Here's 7 Steps To Success:

Write 30 articles about the same topic
Email companies telling them you're an expert on that topic
Offer them a service on a monthly basis
Go back to Step 2 until you have $10k saved
Move to Thailand
Party with me (jk I'm a loser)
Sit on your laptop next to me in the hostel and laugh at all the losers stuck in their shit jobs

Half joking here, but that's really all there is to it. And yeah, you're going to have to spend a little money to get there. But what's $1200? If I told you right now that I could make you famous in your industry for $1200, would you pay me?

No? You'd rather do it the "organic" way and just hope that your breathtaking short story catches the attention of the Steemit Gods? Don't make me LOL.

Of course you would. You'd pay $12,000.

So, what's it gonna be?

What do you think about making the Trending page on Steemit?

Let me know in a comment!

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How To Get To The Trending Page On Steemit Even If You're An Autistic, Paint Chip-Eating Bork Like Me