Day after day you keep hearing be yourself when you post here.
Day after day they keep saying post original contents.
Well, I totally agree with what they said: BUT still there is that one factor which makes the difference..yes its that "W" factor. You need the approval of the whales. You can easily make lots of money if some whales decides to click few mouse buttons for you. If you have dreams on how to make it to "trending" or even "hot"
Day after day you keep trying your best and you get nothing but just few cents. The reality is no matter how awesome your work turns out, no matter how original you get. No matter how many thousand other people appreciate you, it makes no difference, what makes it worth is how many of those people who appreciates you are "WHALES"
Figure:1 - Tuna Catching Net
Lets change the slogan: Steemit was/is never a platform where anybody could earn money by blogging into: -> "Steemit is a social media platform where anybody who gets appreciated by whales can earn money"
Just like me you spend hours on preparing for a post and end up with few upvotes from few bots & sometimes even get downvoted by the system, on the other hand you see people commenting "wow" on a post and ends up with $20-$50 per 3 letters.
Welcome to reality
What you truly need is to catch some big whale, just go back to figure one, yes what you are doing now is trying to catch a whale with a net which you hardly catch one tuna, on steemit terms: you would anyway catch the attention of a hey i followed you please follow me back or that upvote4upvote: duh this is just lame
Figure: 2 - The Sucker
Just look at this screenshot in this figure, I have erased the names for privacy protection. I call it the sucker strategy. You find a whale first. Finding one is not big, but getting him to upvote you is a bit of work. $1.93 from just a one line comment. Yes at this point some of you might wonder how you cant get even $0.019 on a post you make after spending 6 hours researching, compiling, editing, posting etc etc. The answer is you couldnt catch a whale.
One thing I would like to add is that this "whale" is actually a human being. Yes a human being, but somehow he has a higher position, like a boss, like a leader, like a politician, like an MP, like a Minister. In figure 2, the person there is actually doing that sucking strategy, he is following lots of whales, and commenting on the posts made by the whales. The advice here is do comment more and more, but comment on posts made by the whales. Don't bother commenting or even upvoting any minnow's posts.
Advice: If you want to eat something, go to a restaurant where you can order something, why are you going to a shoe store for eating?
You want to catch a whale, then do whatever it takes for the whale to notice you, STOP wasting time on other areas.
Making Friends & Connection
In many posts I read people telling me to make friends here on Steemit. Thats a very legit advice, HOWEVER: when making friends, DO IT WITH WHALES. It might sound cheap, but if you are a poor fella living in the slums and your dream is to ride a luxury car, the best option is to make friendship with someone who owns that car, and chances are one day they might actually would give you a joyride. Make friendship with whales, listen to their blabbering, lend them a companion to listen to their problems and listen all their complains, talk to them outside the blockchain, make them feel wanted, take their mail address, cell numbers, talk to them on whatsapp etc etc
Figure: 3 - Blueprint
Its hard to catch big fishes, but its totally possible, and while many are doing so, why cant you or me? Yes we can also do this, just some planning is necessary.
There are already 350,000 accounts already registered here, with more accounts increasing day by day. And everyone is competing with their contents to gain exposures and earn rewards. So with all these new articles and videos being posted everyday, chances of your article being read by someone is as low as it can get. And most people would just check the blogger's name and/or the blog title and would just hit that upvote button. So when they mention about content quality, I'm like umm yeah whatever. As evidence, just once do check that most articles has more upvotes than views.
When you check out whales and their accounts do try finding for the HappyGoGo Whale
This is a whale who would upvote each and every single comments which other gives on this blog. There are few of those people available here, just click the "reply" button on the whale's account and check the replies which other people have given to them, once you find that person who upvotes every single reply, you hit a jackpot and start with replying him again and again and again. Its much much much worth doing that instead of wasting hours writing a perfect quality post which no one would hardly bother to read.