Before you can be successful, you should believe and appear to be successful.
By believing and appearing to be successful, you naturally gain more followers and upvotes.
I have seen many steemit members who managed to build a great reputation by believing and appearing to be successful. It does have psychological effect.
Your mindset plays an important part. If you are always writing articles about how you struggle in steemit and complain about the little upvotes that you get, you have just deterred yourself from success unknowingly.
Effective title to attract readers
It is something simple and I mentioned in my past article before.
You really need to have good title to attract steemit members to click on your title to read as many may just skip when the title does not sound interesting since there are so many articles appearing every minute.
Use words like ‘success’, ‘effective’, ‘accelerating’ etc to indicate how your article can really help them to grow. Without a good title which is the entrance to your article, there can be no customer entering and you will be frustrated with the lack of visitors resulting low upvotes.
Monitoring steemit tools that I use daily
The following are two of my favourite steemit tools that I use to monitor my steempower as well as my status of account.
The above two tools come in especially handy when I need to know who have upvoted me and the upvoters that I am going to curate when I can find the time to do so.
Fast response to comments using esteem by 
It is very crucial to response quickly to the comments of upvoters in your article. Since my day job can be quite demanding and it is really not appropriate to use my office computer and network to access steemit so I have installed esteem mobile app.
The good thing about esteem is that you can constantly check for reply as well as adjust your voting weight under setting since without a 500 steem power, most of us do not have a slider to start with.
With esteem, I not only response to the comments asap, I have also used it to upvote supportive comments with regulated voting weight. Esteem allows me to adjust my voting weight so I can upvote many of the comments freely.
By doing so, I can upvote as many comments as well as curate the upvoters’ articles with upvote for quality ones.
It is really impossible for me to upvote everyone with 100% voting weight especially with a high increase of upvoters.
This is really a win-win as your article get upvoted while quality comments are upvoted by you as an appreciation. Nevertheless, I do not upvote for every comment made as some are really comments generated by bots.
Using https://busy.org/
I have recently started using https://busy.org/ recently.
This is the first article that I am posting via busy.org
I can access steemit using https://busy.org/ and we can activate the slider for upvote percentage. The slider will not only show the upvote percentage but it also shows the upvote value immediately.
It is really great especially if you have been following me, you do know that I have been curating my upvoters’ articles and blogs to see whether any quality articles that I can upvote or comment.
I was able to speed up my curation process using https://busy.org/ which you can login via steemconnect without any registration needed.
You can even get an upvote by using busy tag when you post through https://busy.org/
Join discord for support
I have just joined the minnowsupport for a few days at the point of this post.
It has a free voting bot and you can get free upvote for your article. The only troublesome part is the need to register where you need to send $0.001 SBD with a code to verify your account before you can use the upvote bot for free.
I have also joined 
If you really need to know more about steemit, I do recommend watching his youtube videos and now there is also dtube.
The advantage of joining a discord is also you can easily ask a question about your doubts to get answers quickly. I started my own journey in steemit without asking too many people but watching and reading lots of articles and youtube videos. It took many hours to do so.
If you use discord, you can probably shorten your process to get your answer you wanted quickly.
You can find the invite link when you click on the banner that is located in the middle of the https://minnowsupportproject.org/discord/
Rapport with other steemit members
I do visit the blogs of steemit members that I have established good relationship with. Establishing good rapport and relationships are not instant noodles and it takes time to develop mutual trust and understanding.
I am glad that I have quite a number of relationships established and my Steemit comrades do visit my articles regularly and upvote them when they like them.
By having a good relationship, we are able to curate one another’s articles effectively. Very often, I can simply upvote most of the articles of steemit members that I know very well since their articles are always maintaining certain quality to my personal expectation.
I do often give minnows an upvote of encouragement too for their effort put into their articles. Everyone needs to start somewhere so we cannot expect a new author to write lengthy quality articles immediately especially when English may not be their common language of use.
Use of upvote bots
I am quite reluctant to share about upvote bots as many may lose more SBD while using it.
The use of upvote bots should be mainly to gain some attention to your article and not a mean to earn using the bots. If you think you can earn using the bots, you may have missed the point.
There are also some members who feel strongly about not using the bots as they felt it is really cheating. They may not be wrong but those who use the bots are not wrong too.
There are two sides of the story. If you have written a very good article and you need the attention, upvote bots can be one option.
Use of steemvoter or steemauto
If you like passive income, you can consider using steemvoter or steemauto that can help you to auto vote your favourite authors even when you are busy with your day job. You can earn curation reward as well as keep an up-to-date reading. You can track your upvotes using steemd or steemnow that I mentioned earlier of this article.
I did include some of my comrades who have been upvoting my articles regularly so that they get my upvotes whenever their articles are out. I can also read and comment on their articles when I can get the time to do so. These upvotes may not get me much curation rewards but supporting one another in Steemit is crucial for success.
Key point to remember is that by giving to others, you may gain more in the end. Don't just look at how much profit you can get by doing so but what are the lasting support and relationship you are solidifying that will be there for many years to come.
Use of steemfollower by 
Recently steemfollower was under maintenance for 5 days until 15 March 2018.
I can feel the difference of the number of upvotes without steemfollower.
Steemfollower is a place where you will upvote quality articles to gain some points and by doing so you get to be upvoted by other members if your articles are liked by them. The advantage is lesser competition since there are only about 10 000 members and your article will appear on random views of steemfollower users.
Please do not treat it as an upvote for upvote system as not everyone gets good upvotes when they have poor quality. There are many who just post photographs without write-up and they did not get much upvotes in steemfollower. This may result in discouragement and claim that the system does not work.
Your reputation rating
This really plays a good part in promoting your article.
When a member sees that you have a high reputation rating, they tend to read your article since it is related to the number of upvotes that you gain.
The higher your reputation rating, the higher chances of more readers and followers.
To gain high reputation, it takes time to build as you really need to have lots of upvotes to increase your reputation rating.
Quality of article
The quality of article is really important to establish a good reputation especially when you do not have high steempower.
-keep your language simple and direct
-Write with a purpose and objective in mind
-Provide practical ideas and not just empty talk
-Add a disclaimer to safeguard yourself
Steem power
To be frank, it is also important to purchase some steem power to show that you are serious about the platform.
By having some steempower that is higher than a newbie, most members do gain more confidence and it is really human nature.
Having some steempower also allows you to upvote comments and other articles with some values since the steempower of minnow is unable to upvote values whenever there is a drop for the price of steem.
You can also see that those with high steempower get upvotes easily even when their articles are of low quality. They still get praises as the upvoters and comments just wanted an upvote from them to earn rewards from authors.
The nature of greed is something we cannot deny regardless of how much we want to say hardwork can get us somewhere but it will take ages. You can shorten the process with some steem power.
I have recently powered up quite a bit since steem price drop. You should consider powering up if you have spare cash but remember not to invest more than you can afford.
I am coming to the end of this article and I have really summarise many of the things that I do to have accelerated growth. Please do your own further research if any of the idea you feel have caught your eyes.
This article is really a reflection and short summary of what I have been doing regular since I joined this platform.
My next article will be 5 days later and I hope you have gained some insights that are helpful to you!
Appreciate your support and acknowledgement of this article greatly!
Disclaimer: This is my personal reflection and I am not in any position to instruct anyone what they should do. I am not responsible for any action taken as a result of this post. My post can only be a reference for your further research and growth. By reading this post, you acknowledge and accept that. All images are taken from google image that are copyright free under labelled for reuse.