I definitely have gained value. Thanks.

A couple quick tips to increase your upvotes: join discord and post your articles in the steemit-trail group and the Whaleshares group, use Chainbb to get upvotes from a couple whales there, and use randowhale to get some more big upvotes on your best posts that could boost your followers more quickly. There are good "how-to" posts about all of those things.

There's a lot to learn about the platform, but with your valuable content, it will be easy to gain followers.