Alright so for followers the most useful thing to do is comment on their posts and follow them first. This will show that you care. Make sure to write sincere comments. Also, when you post, make sure you use all 5 of the hashtags. This will help maximize the amount of people that see your posts. Then one more main thing that you should know, is if you want to increase your reputation score, you need people with a lot of steempower to upvote your posts. Just meaning that the more interactions you have with higher up people on steemit, the more likely you are to be ranked higher. Let me know if you have any questions.