Lately I have heard from friends that want to start “making money on the internet” and because they think “I know things” they come and ask me about Steemit, these are some of the questions that really annoy me:
1. How much money can I make per month?
2. Why are my posts only making cents?
2. How do I cash this out to Pesos or Dollars?
What usually happens is they give up after maybe 4 or 5 posts. The worst part is that they never take any blame for not being persistent or for having poor marketing skills, they end up blaming the whole platform – “Nah, Steemit doesn’t work”. Of course, I guess that is easier than saying “I gave up and I am horrible at marketing myself”.
If you “want to make money online”, you have to be persistent and know about SEO. But above all, if you want to be successful you have to enjoy what you do. I enjoy writing and expressing my ideas, I do it for free at Medium and Reddit. But if you don’t write or post and all of the sudden you want to open an Steemit account and make 1k per month, then you are delusional.
If you are getting similar questions from your friends and family, you could answer them something like this:
1. Depends on what you write and the amount of followers you get, at first you will not get much.
2. Because you are new, nobody knows you or maybe because what you are writing sucks.
3. You convert them to Bitcoin and then to your local currency (This will open up a bunch of other questions, but only worry about that if they do actually end up making some money).
Conclusion
Like many of you, I have been promoting Steemit to my friends and family. But it is best to make sure we bring the people who are not only interested in making money, those people will come and go, we want passionate content creators, those are the ones that will succeed.
Maybe in the future, we could hide the money each post is making. Youtubers make money but that remains private to the user. I believe that attracting users only on the “make money” slogan could be negative in the long run.