1. Introduction to Steemit

What if you got paid to post on Facebook? What if you could make money by upvoting other peoples’ posts on Reddit? Imagine a social media site that rewards people and not greedy shareholders. Welcome to Steemit. This short guide will explain how you can join Steemit.com for free and start earning money right away. But first, we need to explain what Steemit is and how it can afford to pay people like us just for posting blogs, voting, and having fun

Steemit is much more than a money-making opportunity. It is a decentralized social media site, like Facebook or Reddit, but without a big company at the top that sucks out profits. Steemit uses a new model for social media, relying on people instead of advertising. Users post content and help to curate it by upvoting the best content to everyone else’s attention. That puts it beyond the control of greedy corporations, large media conglomerates, and repressive governments. It is the first social media site that’s truly free of these controls.

2. The Trouble with Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Other Social Media

To fully understand Steemit, let us start with one of the problems it was created to address. Wall Street values Facebook at more than $350 billion. Facebook has great technology, it has built a successful business, and it has established itself as the face of social media. But most of Facebook’s valuation comes from its users: one billion of them around the world. Why are Facebook’s users worth so much? A company with access to one billion people is a huge market for advertisers. Companies want to reach Facebook’s users to sell them products and services. When big companies come calling, Facebook and other social media sites are only too happy to sell them data they have gathered on their own users. They gladly sell advertising to these companies. Advertising is content that someone has paid to put in front of you. And Facebook is happy to let big corporations dictate the content that Facebook’s users see first.

Why would Facebook and other social media sites sell out their users this way? Even if the Facebooks of the world began as tiny, innocent startups with good intentions, they now are owned by mega-banks, corporations and rich individuals. These owners and shareholders demand constant growth and increased profits; truth and privacy are lower priorities.

3. Steemit’s Fast Start

Steemit was founded in early 2016 by Ned Scott and Daniel Larimer. Having worked together before, they met for a discussion in January 2016 and found that they shared a common vision for an online social economy. The social media portion of this, Steemit, is just the beginning. In the future, we hope it can be combined with other blockchain-based features, organizations, and third party apps, all geared towards improving peoples’ lives in measurable ways.

Ned Scott is Steemit’s CEO. Based in New York City, he has a background in financial services and business operations. Over the last few years, he had been investing in the Bitcoin space and sharing its opportunities with Wall Street investors. After becoming interested in cryptocurrency, Scott approached Daniel Larimer about creating a blockchain-based social media site that would allow community members to create a mutual aid society. They soon decided that they could accomplish much more than this with Steemit.

4. Getting Started on the Site

Getting started with Steemit is quite simple. Just go to Steemit.com and create a new account. At the moment, you need either a Facebook or a Reddit account in order to sign up and get a few dollars for free in your Steemit account, though this may be expanded to other sign-ups in the future. If you do not have an active Facebook or Reddit account, then you can use a backdoor method to creating a Steemit account; just click this link for instructions. There is a small registration fee to prevent spammers. Using this backdoor method, you can pay the same fee with Bitcoin, with BitShares, or with STEEM that you have purchased on an exchange. If you have never bought Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies before, you will need to convert some money first using a site like Coinbase, CCEDK, or Local Bitcoins. This is what the Steemit site looks like (see below). This view shows the top of the Trending page. The developers are continuing to add new features, so the site might look different by the time you read this. But basically, the articles are in the center, there are Tags for various topics on the right, and then in the top corners there are all sorts of other features. We will explain those features soon.

5. Make Money Posting

Some of you skipped right to this chapter, didn’t you? You have reached the heart of this book, because the next few chapters will show you how to post your content, vote and comment on other posts, and make good money from staying active on the site. The posting and voting are really two sides of the same coin, because in order for posts to make good money, someone has to discover them and upvote them. This is really what you are doing with your votes and comments also. Steemit pays you to make the site better, either by adding good content or curating it. In this chapter, you will learn about posting, followed by some tips for making a successful post. After these chapters, we will move on to explain how voting works and how you can make money by voting, commenting, and staying active on the site.

There is no advertising on Steemit. Unlike Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, blog platforms, news sites, and just about every other revenue-generating site on the Internet, Steemit runs on a different business model. The great thing about this is that big corporations do not control the flow of information. They do not get to decide which content people see. On Steemit, voters like us decide which posts are worthy of being upvoted. This means that you need to post good quality content if you wish your post to become popular and successful. Only the most popular posts will rise to the top. Those will get more exposure and additional upvotes. Ultimately, they will make the most money.

Which Kinds of Posts Make the Most Money? In the next chapter, you will learn some tips for writing a great post. In general, the posts that are most popular (and most highly paid) on Steemit tend to be clear, well-organized, and longer than average. They deliver original content that adds value to Steemit.

Content that adds value can be practical, such as a “how to” article. It can be entertaining, such as a parody or set of memes. It can be creative and artistic, such as an original video or story that someone has written. Steemit’s voters prefer original content that has not simply been re-posted from elsewhere on the Internet, but that represents your own unique work. One other feature that seems to correlate closely with popularity is making your post personal somehow. This is not essential, and you can earn money without doing it, but making it personal is an “it” factor that really, really helps. Someone who can write a blog post that brings in emotion, life experience, or lessons he or she has learned is a whole level above most of the other content on Steemit. There is so much information on the Internet; you will help elevate your writing above the pack by making it real. For some good examples, please see some of the introductions that people make in Steemit under the #introduceyourself tag. These are real and personal. The next chapter has some great tip also.

6. Top Tips for Creating a Popular Post

This chapter began as an article posted on Steemit by co-author Renaud, a.k.a. @cryptoctopus. We have adapted it into a chapter here without changing much. When someone who has sold $3 million worth of Facebook advertising in the last two years gives you advice about creating a popular social media post, it’s best to sit back and listen. Here is his best advice:

It’s not about how much you work on your article
If the word for real estate is "Location, Location, Location"
Make your article irresistible to click on
Create High Value Content
Promote your content properly and build a following

7. Make Money Voting, Commenting, and Having Fun

Another brilliant thing about Steemit is that you don’t need to be a great writer to make money on the site. A generous 25% of the value of each post is paid to the curators, those who vote and comment on that post. So you also get paid for voting and commenting on other peoples’ posts. On Steemit, users are the curators, making sure good content rises to the top, gets read, and gets rewarded.

Voters make great money on Steemit by voting early on posts that become popular, though you need to wait a few minutes before voting on a new post (we will discuss this part soon). The first few votes are very important in bringing a post to the community’s attention, so if you are among the first to discover a good post, you will get a higher paying reward than if you vote after it has become popular.

In the short term, you may make the most money by following top writers on Steemit, since they have track records of creating popular posts that are likely to have big payouts. When you upvote these, you get to share in the total payout, and your share will be highest if you vote early and/or have lots of STEEM Power (more on that in the Steemit Economics chapter). But when you vote on the most well-known writers, you also will be competing there with others (including bots) who are looking out for these names and will upvote them immediately.

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