There's really no way around it. Your posts will not be seen when you have few followers. In order to grow your blog, you have to generate a readership.
After initially joining Steemit, you will see anywhere from 10-100 followers come in automatically. Certain users feel following every person is worthwhile, generally in the hopes of getting followed back.
Don't be fooled...and don't bother to follow them back. It will just clog your feed.
They won't be reading or interacting with your articles; and some of them will be bots. They are probably only there to try and sell you a resteem service in your wallet transfer notes:
Names removed to protect the "innocent".
This means that, realistically, you are going to need at least a few hundred followers (300+) before you transition into spending any significant portion of your Steemit time on authoring blog posts. Even at 1500 followers, I still find that I can not rely solely on my existing followers and I must continuously generate new and engaged followers from working in the comments and blogs of others.
You need real, engaged (or, at least voting) followers before your hard work on original posts will be consistently rewarded.
If you try to do this from the pages of your own blog, you will be faced with a chicken/egg conundrum. You have no readers, so you must write content...but since you have no readers, your hard work goes un- or under-rewarded.
That's a recipe for fast burnout.
Burnouts often end in meltdowns, as seen above.
The solution to this paradox is commenting on the blogs of others - but this is actually jumping one step ahead, and something I'll talk about next post.
Before you can go looking for followers, you have to set your blog up for success. You want to maximize the chances that users who glance at your blog for a few seconds (hopefully, after reading your high quality comments we'll discuss in part 3) hit that "FOLLOW" button.
Hopefully, you already hit that one.
First, you must write a killer post in the "introduceyourself" tag. There are perhaps many other users who have written better guides on this particular topic (see @TeamSteem's here). However, some good general rules include:
- Verify yourself if you are choosing not to remain anonymous, via linking other social media or images with verification signs.
- Invest any stake you plan on investing before the post, as it may serve as a worthwhile talking point and show you are serious.
- Remember to use images, formatting, etc.
- Don't pigeonhole yourself, but try to mention what you intend to post about, or your expertise.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, try to highlight what you want to bring to the table at Steemit over what you want to get from Steemit.
Don't worry, the inverse is implied by virtue of your human nature.
Follow that up with a couple of pieces of high quality content (we'll go over some dos and don'ts for high quality content later in this series), preferably of the type you hope to produce. This will populate your blog page, so that people who check your blog before deciding to follow you will see that you do have at least one page of content.
These posts aren't going to earn the rewards that you think they are worth, but again, you don't have the followers yet. Look at these pieces of content as loss-leaders - product you offer at a discount to get people's foot in the door.
Do NOT resteem any content. You simply don't want anything on your front page that is not yours. You do not have an audience to resteem to, so avoid clogging your blog view with posts that are not yours. This early, you want to remove any and all obstructions to your content being viewed by others. Even if your resteems are great, you do not want to have people clicking OUT of your blog once they are starting to poke around inside it.
If you are planning to invest in Steem, do it early. This will show lookie-loos that you are serious, and may generate you a few "Remora" upvoters and commenters. This isn't necessarily a huge help, but having a few butt-kissers around to vote and populate the comments on each of your threads is still helpful early on, even if they only engage with your content in the hopes of an upvote-handout.
Remoras....shark tested, begrudgingly @Lexiconical approved.
At this point, you have properly set the stage for your a serious run at gaining followers. This will not take place on your blog, but in the blogs of others on Steemit. We'll talk more about the strategy I still use to increase my follower count in part 3.
If you have any questions, or would like me to elaborate on any point, please ask in the comments! I will really try to answer any question whatsoever.
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