Can you make a salary on steemit??

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I have been working full time for almost two months now.

So it's time to be realistic and to share some thoughts, after doing quite a bit of research on the platform today. The hope of this post, is to educate others and share my experiences and thoughts about this and also something that I want to share also.

This is my work not my job.

I think @shadowspub hit the proverbial nail on the head today, when she said this is not my job this is my work. While it does not look like it I work anything up to 13 hours on the platform, reading content, curating, posting and looking to better myself.

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It is a timely concept and not an easy feat, to make your posts shine, look professional and appealing. But 90% of those posts now what took me 30 minutes to post when I first started, can now take me 3-8 hours, depending on the subject. Not to mention the formatting of the post, the markdown, tagging research, working on a decent headline etc.

Then there are the initiative ideas that I bander around from time to time, when I think I have a good idea and try it it does not work. But when I have an idea, I try and think thats not so great it tends to work, try and work that logic out?

Not to mention the hours of endless networking that I do, in over 30 discord groups Talking to people, asking questions, finding out who is good on Steemit. Discovering who deserves some attention, because they are truly talented and have received very little recognition in the process.

An overall look at my wallet.

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So I am going to do some calculations you can go into my wallet and see for yourself its public, thats the one good thing about steem, the transparency of it.

I have almost 453 Steem banked as SP, and 4.197 SBD in my wallet.

Lets do some maths.

current rate of steem as of today is 1 steem is $1.56 according to coin market cap.

Current Rate of SBD 1 SBD is $1.58.

453 x $1.56 = $706.68
4 x $1.58= $6.32

Total liquidity= $713.00

Now I might have got that completely wrong but that is how I work it out. On top of that I have been powering up my SBD, because it was not worth cashing out while steem is so low. I don't have the money to invest in buying more steem, so I chose to value it against my upvote.

So if I were to start to power down I get 1/13 of my SP back which in other terms means I get a portion of it for 13 weeks.

453/13 = 34.846 Steem per week. USD value approx $53.

Doesn't look like a lot for someone doing 8-13 hours work a day does it?

Well that is an unfair statement, because there has been a slight increase on the amount of upvotes received in March. As opposed to the earlier months and a number of factors, were taken into consideration. As I said earlier, post content, markdown etc all has to be taken into account. It would be a fairer statement to say, that the time I invest into the platform perfecting my craft, helps to increase the amount of rewards received over all.

Why are your payouts so low compared with some that are much higher.

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This is a question I long asked myself until recently, most people who look at the trending pages will see posts with big payouts. But I want to share something that I have observed with what is happening with a large majority of these trending posts, which at the beginning I was far from impressed but now I have had another thought.

Have you looked at a trending post, in more detail other than looking at the amount.

Lets look at some trending posts and see what the votes are made up of.

So we are looking at the trending page story here and we can see that user hitwill has posted something about Formula 1 in Melbourne. The post has earned over $900 in rewards, remember that is not all theirs. 25% goes to the curators 75% goes to the author then its a 50/50 split unless the author powers up 100% to sp.

Now lets look at the post.

Pretty girls and fast cars in Melbourne's Formula 1

Sot its all about the F1 race, that took place and some pictures while they were there and a few paragraphs. Ok so nothing special, you might now be thinking well how has it earned so much. Or at least I used to think so. So we need to look at the upvotes on the post, lets take a look at that now.

Ok so I can see a few bots here, post promoter, jerry banfield, build a whale, up me etc So I am assuming I could be wrong, but the user has paid bots to upvote their post, to help it rank in the trending pages, it could have been another user but I highly doubt, someone is going to pay a decent about of SBD for another steemian to rank so highly.

Now if we look at the tags the user has put in their posts they have tagged it, travel, melbourne, story and australia.

Now if we go to the travel page we can see the same post ranks at the top of there also.

So what does this mean, is this person trying to make a quick buck on the platform?would you say that the post deserves such a high payout?

I spoke to @jonny-clearwater about this.

Jonny runs a great post called hots or shots, where he interviews people around the states where they both drink a shot and he reads out questions and they talk about them.

Hots or Shots Episode 4 with guest @richardcrill

I was pleased to see, that Jonny has been trending for the past two days, in Life and Steemit and ranked at the top. I asked him why he did it and was it worth it, investment wise. Jonny advised he probably spend about 300 sbd on the promotion, and he probably would break even but that he did it more to promote the post for advertising, because it's a series and not just a one off. So the investment, was to attract more readers in the coming episodes, than it was for the actual payout of the post.

So even the use of bots on a regular basis, would not be a good option for payouts, but more for promoting your overall brand.

In conclusion.

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I think its a fair assumption to say that unless you already have a large sum of capital ready to invest into steemit and rank whale, then your journey is going to be a long one. There are highs and there are lows to steemit. The highs being things like getting to meet the people, the price of steem when it is high. The lows being the consistency of posting, the long hours for little reward.

But in all fairness, the majority of us need to understand this is a long term investment, realistically we are getting money for nothing. The majority of us need to be more grateful that we have the blockchain available to us, yes there are a lot of politics but we should not waste time getting involved in them, but work to help each other grow.

If we can move away from looking at the trending pages in a way that, we automatically assume our posts deserve to be there. They probably do and they can but you need to invest the time and money if you want to get such a large audience.

If we equally invested the time also in people, who are publishing great content and getting involve with the community. That will take longer but its safe to say, that after almost two years steemit is still here. Whether we like it or not it is an opportunity for us to make money, regardless of what salary we draw from it. Your pay cheque is what ever you want it to be, you just have to work hard to make it.

Thank you for reading.

xoxo

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