I started my Steemit account about a year ago and and I amazed I have grown as much as I have. When I started I had little to no response in my posts. Sometimes bots would post but, that's about it. About three to six months in, I started getting comments from real people saying real things. More than just, nice photo… or followed please follow back.
Some of these early followers are 
Using a great app called UNDERSTEEMED, which I will talk about more later. I found Yusuf, he lives in Aceh and I commented on a tropical plant that I liked. Since I like plants alot I find other people's plant shots and comment on them and from there I made a good friend on Steemit. He told me about how he helped out Americans years ago to a boat terminal and even showed me a picture. He would write out long comments and seemed to put his heart into every post. Sadly, he got his account hacked later through phishing.
Its VERY important to only login to steemit with your private posting key when surfing on steemit, you can find it under Wallet, and then Permissions. That way if your account pw gets stolen they cannot lock you out, as long as you have your master password you can log in that way and reset your private posting key. Anyways Yusuf came back about a month later with his new account!
hah like the name Yusuf :-)
Yusuf let his friends know about me and I got alot of exposure overnight, I see alot of Aceh users coming online and really love their content.
Aceh! You have shown up on Steemit with an amazing amount of content and comments.. Thank you for joinin us here at Steemit!
Though many of his friends and family, and the general Aceh community continue to upvote me and continue to comment on my new content. I do my best to upvote in return but I have a hard time keeping up hah! Many of you are:
Thank you to many others that you leave consistent upvotes and comments, around the world:
Other special thanks to: 
Some tools I have found to be extremely useful in the last year:
UNDER_STEEMED: https://sydneyitguy.github.io/understeemed/
I use this almost every day. It gathers posts by filters that are considered understeemed or not being noticed enough. You can set alot of different filters in there so its one of the best I use.
Steem Followers: https://steem.makerwannabe.com/@freedomcoin/followers/1
I have friends that tell me they just followed me, but then I have trouble finding them in my hundreds of followers unless they comment. The Steem follower site will show you week by week or month by month on who joined. And also who muted you, which can be interesting.
Upvoters: http://steem.loadsup.net/upvoters/
This tool shows you who upvotes you alot, their SP, their voting amount on your posts and more. Its a great way to see who are consistent followers.
Going forward - I will keep posting to my 
account, but slowly moving over to my new account 
Please follow
My appreciation cannot be expressed to everyone that has taken a liking to my content, this is my first attempt at “blogging” and I am amazed with my follower count, comments and depth of immersion in the community. But thank you everyone of you for following and viewing me at the very least, at for all the great posts, comments and upvotes at the very most!
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