Hello Steem! Progress on the Musician’s Guide is IMMENSE. Read on for important info.
Oh man. I’m so excited to share this news.
Our Team is Awe-Inspiring
Firstly: Our first batch of hires is going GREAT.
I’d like to give a special shout out to 
Technically Kryptik is the Community Liaison of the Musician's Guide Project, but that title doesn’t reveal the full scope of his work: Research and Logistics are a lot of what he does, and he’s currently scouring Steem for the best graphic designers and potential interviewees for future editions of the book.
Meanwhile 
Lastly 
In This Post: The Musician’s Guide Project's First-Ebook
This post will share the first draft of our first eBook, a precursor to the full Musician’s Guide.
It’s called “From Good to Great - How to Get Your First 1,000 Followers on Steemit” and, as the title suggests, it is about building your audience on Steem.
Honestly I am prouder and prouder with each passing day of this. Even in its early form, I feel that this eBook is packed full of valuable information and frankly may be the most useful resource on the entire internet for starting out as a Steemian.
Now I want to refine and dress up the ideas, between editing and graphics and book layout, so that the book absolutely pops out and grabs attention all around the Steem network.
If I may be so bold - by the end of March, you might see this eBook on the top trending page of Steemit. I’m literally 600 miles from home in NYC right now making moves to try and hit that #1 trending spot for the first time ever.
With all that said, it’s still scary and difficut lol so I’m trying to pump myself up and stay confident. Your support and feedback is the only thing that makes any of this possible.
So THANK YOU! And with no further ado, here is the first draft of the eBook:
eBook Alpha: How to Get Your First 1000 Followers on Steemit, the Smart Way
Introduction: Is This Book For You?
This book is for everybody on Steemit who wants to do better.
You can see the big success stories of steem - all those high earners on the front page with thousands of fans - but you aren’t sure how you can become one of them. Your audience is modest and your rewards seem stuck at a few bucks or less per post.
You work hard to create good content. You have some friends on Steem and you hang out in Steem Chat or Discord from time to time. Yet, you feel like you aren’t one of the “lucky ones.”
Does that sound like you? Don’t worry, as is this a normal part of the Steem process. Most of us had to experience the dull lows of early Steemhood before we reached the kind of prosperity that you see on the front page.
It turns out that growing your account on Steem is about “leveling up” over and over.
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Level 0 (Green Slime At Start of JRPG Status):
[Green Slime Pixel Art]
The newest Steemians know nothing about this platform. As an absolute newbie, you want to learn how to navigate the site and make posts/comments/votes.
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Level 1 (Plankton Status):
[Plankton Pixel Art]
Pretty soon you’ll be posting, commenting, resteeming, the whole works. You’ll follow some accounts and even have a few followers of your own. You have evolved from a “potential newbie” to a real-deal plankton. This is where the journey really starts.
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Level 2 (Minnow Status):
[Minnow Pixel Art]
After the first few weeks or maybe months, you start to feel at home on Steem. By now you have a few hundred followers and a three digit SP number, happily voting other people’s content up by $0.10 at a time. This is often the first plateau where progress becomes difficult.
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Level 3 (Dolphin Status):
[Dolphin Pixel Art]
Some people get here quickly through buying SP with cash… but for most, it’s about a year of work to reach the 1,000 follower mark and earn your first 5,000 SP. If you cash out some SP to pay for things (rent, debt, music gear), you might not be a real “dolphin” - technically I am a minnow by SP - but once you hit four digits of real human followers, you’re definitely a dolphin-status influencer with your posts.
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Level 4 (Whale Status):
[Whale Pixel Art]
Behold the mighty whale. It wanders the earth, bestowing massive $10+ votes with its 100k+ steem power, making huge delegations, launching gigantic projects. Hopefully in a few years I can write “From Dolphin to Whale,” the sequel to this book, once I get there myself :-D.
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The path to 1,000 followers consists of taking the initiative to add value to the Steem blockchain. You don’t need to know how to any programming or development to do this. Non-developers can contribute to Steem’s economy by creating jobs and opportunities for other people.
It won’t be easy. Becoming a real Steem dolphin means letting go of your minnow-like naivety and learning how to get some bigger stuff done.
To climb to higher ranks of the Steemit ladder, you’ll have to push yourself past your current comfort zone. It will require a lot of hours of work. You will need to find the bravery to try new things - even though these experiments may result in short-term failure.
Are you ready? I wish you good luck. Let’s get started:
Part One: The Philosophy of Steem Success
01: The Reasons to Pursue Steem Success
With great effort comes great rewards.
You know how I was just saying that it’s going to be a big challenge to achieve dolphin status on the Steem blockchain? That first thousand followers won’t be easy - but the rewards can be huge.
Once you build up an audience of 1,000 real followers, you have enough of a platform to seriously pursue a full-time income off of the Steem blockchain.
If you compare this to other platforms - YouTube, Twitch, etc - it is quite astonishing. If you have 1,000 fans on Twitch, which might earn you 10-25 concurrent viewers at a time, you would earn very little.
On YouTube, well we’ve all heard the horror stories there. Even if you do earn money, your videos might get demonetized for ridiculous and inconsistent reasons.
Thus the fact that 1,000 fans on Steem is theoretically enough to survive off of is astounding. This isn’t the “1,000 true fans theory” by the way. That theory is about having 1,000 true fans, people for whom you are their favorite person, the ultimate inspiration, a rock star. That’s awesome but way harder to do than what I am describing. This is more like, “1,000 true acquaintances” theory, as you only need people to like you enough to give you some upvotes.
Of course you want to get true fans, and that can happen in time. In fact Steem will give you a stable income that enables you to do the bigger and more difficult kind of work to get those true fans.
All of the work and occasional discomfort will be well worth it when you begin cashing in a few hundred bucks per week in Steemit rewards. Trust me :-)
On the plus side: Even a minnow can earn $50 to $100 per week of steem with a good strategy, especially after the first month or two. That will slowly grow towards the more full-time-viable income of $400 to $600 per week.
Right now is probably the easiest it will ever be to build an income stream on Steemit. As time goes on, more and more people will become successful but the competition will increase even faster. These are still the “early days” - but to be honest, the early days might turn into the “middle days” soon so I wouldn’t wait.
This eBook will teach you how to get your first 1,000 followers.
02: The Importance of Using The Right Content Marketing Tactics
There are two kinds of users who reach 1,000+ followers on Steemit.
One kind of person does it the old fashioned way. They post lots of great content for months and months until finally, after a lot of patience and hard work, they get over 1,000 followers.
The other kind of person uses cheap tricks to get above 1,000 followers as fast as possible. This person wants to look good at all costs.
Here are some examples of “cheap tricks” that can be used:
- Follow-for-follow tactics where you follow thousands of active users to get “followbacks”
- paying people to follow you
- leaving spam comments
- running a robot script that leaves generic comments on other people’s accounts
- paying for upvotes
- trying to use upvote-for-upvote to get more rewards
The list goes way further than this, but that is enough to get the idea.
Using these cheap and abusive tactics will not get you a real audience. Spam only attracts other spammers. It doesn’t lead to good rewards or engagement.
Stick to the real tactics of great content and community engagement. These are slow and steady and they really work. You will get higher quality followers this way. Here are some examples:
- Post high quality content once per day
- Leave relevant comments on other users’ content
- Make friends, join a few chats on Discord, Slack, or Steem Chat
- Explore Steem: Live streaming, video, audio, memes, microblogs, longform content, and more
- Save up Steem Power over time, even if you don’t spend a penny of external money on it.
Using the proper tactics feels slower at first but actually much faster in the long run. In a few years you could be gaining hundreds of high quality followers per day - this kind of thing dwarfs any short-term gains you can get with spam.
03: A Quick Note about Spam on Steem
You will see a LOT of people doing ridiculous stuff on Steem. For example you might see people spamming comments and upvoting themselves hundreds of times across different posts.
What do they get for all their work? Usually it’s about $1 per day.
To a lot of people, that seems ridiculous. Why would you spend that much time and energy to earn so little? But - Steemit is a global economy. So a lot of the people spamming out that $1 per day are actually earning an OK living relative to their local economy.
That’s why you will see this kind of activity so often. The sad thing is, these same people could actually build a blog by talking about their lives - and then they could earn several dollars per day and do better.
Hell, some of them could become real popular Steemians and earn hundreds of dollars per day - then they would have the kind of wealth that can lift up entire communities.
When you see all the spam on the edges of Steemit, have sympathy but try not to encourage it. And definitely do not participate in it yourself.
04: How Long Does It Take to Reach 1,000 Followers on Steem?
The answer to this question is different for everybody.
It took me about 8 months to reach my first 1,000 followers and another 4 months or so to get to 2,000. It felt slow on a day-by-day basis but I was happy to cross the four-digit threshold once it happened.
I’ve seen people get to 1,000 followers within 3-4 months but that is not normal. Most people who achieve quick success have useful connections on Steem prior to joining.
Some users do not accrue followers as quickly. If you do not post at least five times per week, it is certainly possible that you won’t reach 1,000 followers in your first year. It’s possible to build your audience more slowly, although a lack of momentum can be a challenge that requires some creativity to overcome.
For the slower approach to Steem, community engagement is all the more important. You will need more “true fans” to make up for your lack of consistent posting, so be active in the chats.
Try a little bit of everything as you explore how to grow your audience. Posting more often, having better posts, or leaving more high quality comments on other peoples’ content can all help to increase your follower growth rate.
The worst thing is to get discouraged and post less often. This will only make a slow growth rate become even slower.
You will need patience to succeed on Steemit. It never happens as fast as you want, even if it happens pretty fast. If you are setting goals, give yourself at least six months to reach your first thousand followers. Remember that quality is much more important than quantity especially in the early stages of your Steem career.
Part 2: Strategies to Grow Your Steem Reputation & Followers
05: Leading Your Steem Tribe
Your true fans are the people who don’t just upvote or read your posts, but actually respond and engage with your content regularly. A true fan knows your story and knows what you’ve been up to for the last few months. They recommend you to other people and love to see new updates from your blog.
You will start to earn true fans as you develop the habit of posting great Steem content daily.
This is crucial because the ultimate goal of any content creator is to develop a stable base of true fans. As the famous Kevin Kelly “1000 true fans” philosophy suggests, if you can get 1000 people to spend $100 per year on you and your content, you can earn $100,000 per year without a job, a manager, financial backing, or any other baggage.
In the shorter term you can build your crew of 1,000 Friendly Acquaintances, those people who will read and upvote our content from time to time. If they average a yearly contribution of $20, that’s enough to earn $20,000 per year, not ballin’ status but enough that you can avoid other jobs and focus on your content.
When you start accruing true fans, you are becoming the leader of a tribe on Steemit. We all organize into tribes throughout our lives - as fans for bands and TV shows, as members of political groups or dietary ideologies or participants in clubs and conversations.
People naturally separate into these tribal groups of like-minded humans. On Steemit this happens when readers flock to their favorite content creators.
The newbie who first visits Steem will begin by clicking on some of the top articles on the home page. Thus the most popular users gain even more fans. As an up-and-comer you will have to fight harder to earn that kind of attention.
That hustle over time enables you to become the leader of your own Steem tribe. By the time you reach 1,000 followers, your tribe will have a bit of heft to it. You’ll have some of that momentum that makes it easier to get even more followers.
There is a lot that you can do to cultivate your fans and build your tribe. The key thing is to never take any of your followers for granted.
Anybody who gives you their attention is your most important person of the moment. They are the people who make what you want to do possible. Treat them like the VIPs of your career, because they are.
How do you treat fans like VIPs?
For starters, respond to all of their comments. Leave a thoughtful response when possible, and at least a “Thank you” or a small upvote when not. By responding to comments, you give your supporters the personal attention and public recognition that they crave.
This task of being good to your fans gets harder over time. When your posts get 10+ thoughtful responses every time, and you’re spending 20+ hours a week writing, editing, posting, engaging… the whole thing becomes much more overwhelming.
This is a good problem to have - being overwhelmed by support! Enjoy this early stage of your journey. Have fun with it and you’ll naturally move towards more engagement over time.
06: Joining Other Tribes: How to Engage With Communities on Steemit
Steemit is a large online ecosystem with about 50,000 daily active users and new people joining every day. This is a perfect time to join. Here’s why:
(1) Steemit is big enough that there are many community projects designed to help newer users get votes and support - from @Curie to @OCD and well beyond.
(2) It’s small enough that there is still room for new users to grow an audience. Anybody who joins Steemit in 2018 is still in the “early days” of the site if you think about it.
Unfortunately many users make a big mistake that hampers their ability to succeed on Steemit. They join the site with the goal of making money as fast as possible.
The awkward truth is that money obsession will hurt your ability to earn here. Be smart with your money, not obessesed over it - and spend most of your energy focusing on people and ideas.
If you focus on learning and engaging with other people, you will go far on Steemit. There are sub-communities for a lot of different interests - from poker to sandwiches to homesteading and much more. That’s where you can enrich your life and make new friends, both of which will lead towards greater earnings over time.
The process of meeting other people is both an art and a science. While you can’t predict the outcome of any one interaction with another person, you can use a basic method that ensures some social success.
Joining a Community on Steem
There are many communities on Steemit. Even though the official “communities” feature is not yet implemented, ambitious users have formed large organizations themed around certain goals.
Why join a community?
Being a part of a community on Steemit is the key to real success on the website. In fact I am not sure if it is possible to be truly successful on Steem without being a part of at least one sub-community within Steemit.
Taking part in a project will do so many things for you. For starters, it gives you something to actually do other than wander around hoping to get upvotes.
If you are a part of a Steem community, you’ll have some idea of how to proceed with your day-to-day Steem activities. For example by joining the open mic community you’ll now have the option of posting one or more Open Mic entries throughout each week.
Even more importantly, taking part in a community will connect you with established Steemians. As soon as you get into a Discord channel relating to Steem, you’ll be in conversations with users that have been here for months or even years.
Many of Steem’s biggest influencers hang out in the community chats and threads that take place around Steemit. That’s how they got so popular!
Here are a few of the different kinds of communities on Steemit:
Curation Groups: These are the groups, like @Curie and @OCD and 
Contest Groups: There are many opportunities to compete for prizes on Steemit. Steemit Open Mic is the most popular contest with hundreds of entries and five people winning big prizes each week, on top of dozens of consolation prizes and goodies. Smaller and similarly entertaining contests include the weekly Steem Sandwich Contest and the Steemit Poker League.
Interest Groups: Some communities aren’t projects - they are just tight-knit groups of users who blog about the same thing. Homesteading is one example of this - and it’s a high-earning category on Steem, including one of the most popular and high-earning Steemians: 
Incubators: A Steem Incubator is a lot like a Business Incubator: It’s where promising Steemians and steem project teams go to find funding and mentorship for their work. With Steem, these incubators can offer upvotes, rather than direct funds, allowing for intriguing new models. Right now 
Start out by focusing on contest and interest groups. These are the easiest to join, with many of them encouraging new users to participate.
Here are two communities on Steemit that are particularly good to check out early in your Steem quest:
(1) Minnow Support Project
The Minnow Support Project, or MSP, is one of Steemit’s largest projects. The purpose of the MSP is to help “minnows,” aka new users, get started and find success on Steem.
MSP is an awesome resource centered around a large Discord channel full of users from all around the Steem ecosystem. You’ll encounter other newbies like yourself as well as powerful whales and Steem influencers.
By seeking out opportunities within MSP, you will start to earn upvotes and followers. For example there’s a 24/7 MSP radio station which often has 10-20 people hanging out in the chat, so that is a good place to go. The main chatroom is often the best opportunity, just waiting for conversations to happen and chiming in when you can.
You can find more information about the Minnow Support Project here.
(2) Steemit Chat
Steemit Chat (found at https://steemit.chat) is where a lot of Steemians hang out to talk in real time throughout the day. It’s arguably the “main chat” of the Steem network.
When you first join Steemit Chat you will spend most of your time in the general chatroom. This is where all users go when they first join the platform. It’s a great place to meet some new people so be sure to introduce yourself.
Over time you may discover some other good channels on Steemit Chat. General chat and its offshoots (like the shapeshifting General 2.0, a rumored invite-only chat for regulars) are the most active chats, but some others can be good too.
The Steemit chat landscape changes often enough that I won’t recommend specific channels. Instead, meet people on Steemit Chat’s general channel and ask them for up-to-date recommendations.
Communities Will Take You Far
Being a member of a larger group within Steemit is the key to making a lot of friends and building up a strong “home base” to rely on. You’ll get new followers, setting yourself up for successful content as soon as you start posting original topics of your own.
Participating in a community is not a one-time activity. You will naturally find new groups to participate in, and may stop participating in old ones, as time goes on.
Keep an eye out for new groups to be a part of. Once you have a full schedule, you can scale back on this - but not until then. Finding strong communities to be a part of is one of the most important things you can do on Steemit.
07: Be a Mentor For Other Users
As you progress in your Steem journey you will develop valuable wisdom about the platform. By the time you have your first few hundred followers, you may be ready to mentor to other newer Steemians.
Teaching other people how to succeed on Steemit is one of the best ways to enhance your Steemit experience.
For one thing, it’s just the right thing to do. You had to learn the ropes when you first stated on Steemit. A lot of other people have helped you to get to the point where you are today. It’s only fair to pay it back by helping other users too.
For another thing, teaching forces you to truly understand your own methods. You will clarify your ideas by passing them on to somebody else.
Mentorship can be official or it can be casual. In the official case you would find a new user and guide them day-by-day through their career on Steemit. This would be a lot of work so it only makes sense to do it if you really want to help one person in particular.
The other option is the casual mentorship where you can simply be available to some of your close Steemit friends via private messages and comments. They can ask you questions every now and then and you can keep an eye on their blogs. This is the kind of relationship that tends to develop naturally on Steemit.
Remember that everybody will have their own style on Steemit. Your goal is to offer helpful advice but not to preach every little thing about how somebody should use their account.
You can make a big difference by helping a few Steemians - as the impact of your generousity spreads, it grows exponentially. Those who you teach today may themselves turn into the teachers of tomorrow.
Choose Your Mentorship Projects Carefully
When you agree to be a mentor for somebody, you are giving them a lot of your time and energy. This person will have the power to distract and confound you. Thus you must pick an excellent mentorship candidate.
Make sure to spend ample time identifying potential mentorship candidates before you pick somebody. Absolutely do not pick the first person who comes to mind.
Mark Zuckerberg has a great rule of thumb for hiring people, and it applies to mentorship too: “Only hire someone who you would be willing to work for.”
In other words - if the tables were turned and the other person was the one offering to mentor YOU on a new platform, would you accept? If not, don’t mentor them.
Once you start mentoring somebody, you are entering into a long term relationship that could go for months, years, even a lifetime. It will be smart to take some baby steps by engaging with various users and watching them work for a few weeks before deciding to commit to a long-term mentorship.
Aim to make a large impact by mentoring the most promising users on Steem. One excellent mentorship can be more powerful than a dozen mediocre ones.
08: Start a Steem-Powered Project
Once you pass 500 followers and are getting a consistent 3-5 comments on most of your posts, you can consider starting a steem-powered project.
You might feel like starting your own project - from idea, to recruitment, to funding - could be too hard. That’s something for fancy businesspeople, right? You may want to relax and just do some simple work each day.
On the other hand, you might be overestimating this. It’s hard - but no harder than writing a great song or making your first great meal. If you have the ambition, there is a way to do it.
If you think about everything on the internet, it’s all the result of individuals starting projects. Every single website has to be started by somebody, and every piece of content on those websites are also spearheaded by people.
It’s people all the way down!
I remember when I was younger I used to participate in a message board themed around the reality show Survivor. At first people just used the forum to talk about the show. Then, as the community grew, we started having games of Survivor on the forum where we’d actually vote each other off of the “island”. If you have ever played the party game Mafia - this was similar.
What started as a simple conversational forum became a thriving community with dozens of members and multiple games running in parallel.
Steemit is a lot like that, except with way bigger stakes. Steemit has money attached, making it a more powerful vehicle for real positive change in the world.
You can think of Steemit as a new source of money for projects, an alternative to the “old school” method of crowdfunding as popularized during the last decade of web 2.0.
What could you accomplish if you had $2,000 for a useful project? Steemit makes that kind of thing possible almost on a whim. You can spend a few weeks (or months, if needed) fundraising until you have the money and then execute the project.
This book was a Steem project!! We raised money to fund the creation of all the graphics, to finalize the book design, hire a professional editor, and much more. Everybody was hired from within the Steemit community.
Other examples of Steem-powered projects include Steem Park, a park installation in a popular area of the Bed-Stuy neighborhood in Brooklyn, and a college level history course in Philly that utilized the blockchain to engage students on a new level. Both of these stories demonstrate different use cases for using Steemit to improve your local community.
Don’t think about this selfishly - instead, think on the community level. What could you do to make a visible impact that improves people’s lives around you?
With Steemit, we are moving to a new era of the internet. It won’t be perfect - nothing ever is - but it’ll be a whole lot better at allocating funds to valuable projects that help our communities. This will be true on the local, regional, national, and even global level.
One day you will be able to visit a “Steemit Charities of the Day” page and give a few upvotes to the best available causes of the moment.
You’ll be able to help fund educations, medical treatments, and new research. One day you’ll feed a hungry child across the world, the next you might help a teenager in Nebraska raise funds for a recording session.
Whatever your inclination - Steem is a way to improve the world. Starting a project is not easy, it’ll take a lot of work and trial-and-error but in the end it is the most rewarding way to use this platform. And as a nice bonus, you’ll gain a lot of new followers and community clout if you pull off a great project.
So what do you say?
Epilogue: Where to Find Help for Starting Projects
This is the biggest and most difficult step in the book. That’s why I would like to invite you to reach out to me directly if you are trying to start a project.
I promise to read and respond to all relevant, non-spammy comments on my Steem blog: https://steemit.com/@heymattsokol. You can ask me anything and I’ll give you the best answer that I can. This basically means I’m available for free consultations, within reason, all the time.
With that said, the flip side is this: I cannot accept private messages from people I have not met. I’m sorry about this, but it is inevitable. Even at this early stage of my career I’m already overwhelmed with messages, so I will be blocking anybody who messages me without prior permission / already knowing me.
In the future I hope to improve on this system, so you should have even easier and clearer access to me… but for now this is pretty good.
On that note, we’ve reached the end of this eBook. I hope that these tactics help you reach 1,000 followers on Steem and far beyond.
Note: If you enjoyed this book, stay tuned. It’s actually the adaptation of the fifth chapter from “The Musician’s Guide to Steemit,” an epic book that covers EVERYTHING you need to know to succeed as a musician on the Steem platform.
If you want to receive a free copy of that book when it comes out, just drop your email [over here]. [author’s note: email link to be added soon)
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Post Note: What do you think of the eBook? Any feedback is appreciated!!