First of all, I'd like to say WELCOME! You've taken the first step to success on steemit, and that ofcourse, is signing up! If you're anything like me, your first few hours/days/weeks here have been confusing and stressful, and yet extremely exciting. Steemit truly is the future of social media, and with the recent growth rates of this sites user base (thousands a day!) the time to get started and build your following is now!
What Should I Know?
While I'm still a newbie myself and can't really get into the minute details of how this site functions, I CAN provide you with a little info about the types of users here. Users can typically be found in one of three categories:
- Whales
- Dolphins
- Minnows
For the purpose of this post, we'll stick to Whales and Minnows.
Whales - These are the big players on the site.They carry a lot of steem power and a single vote from a whale can increase the value of your post significantly.
Minnows - The little guys like you and I. There are A LOT of us here on steemit, and our votes used to be worth very little. With the HF19 updates a lot has changed, and while an individual vote from a minnow still isn't worth all that much, we as a group have some serious power on the site!
The Minnow Support Project
This is where the #minnowsupport project comes into play. Its a discord channel that aims to unite minnows in an effort to help us all grow. It has some amazing users who will do absolutely everything they can to help you grow.
They've been able to help me out in so many ways it's incredible:
- Upvoting, commenting and resteeming is not uncommon there
- The channel has greeters like @Gmuxx and @NicNAS who will help you get all set up on the minnow support program
- Friendly conversation leads to friends and eventually followers
- Almost ANY question I've had about how to properly use steemit has been answer by the amazing people who support the project
Steemit can be daunting at first, but you don't have to figure it out alone :) Come join us over at https://discord.gg/HYj4yvw , I'll do whatever I can to help you out!!
Be sure to follow 
All the best!