I almost couldn't believe that my Media Dapp Review of SteemPeak was selected as one of the winners of the 'Review a Media DApp' contest. This is my second win in a row of one of the open tasks hosted by 
The thing is, writing these articles for Oracle-D is becoming easier and easier. While I spent around two days writing on my first winning article, the second one was finished after just a couple of hours. I've managed to create a very smooth workflow for myself, just by studying the Oracle-D guidelines over and over and I've also helped other people improve their writing along the way.
Don't Give up & Learn From Me!
Look, I know some people are a little bit disappointed that they didn't win. Don't be discouraged if you didn't win, there will be more opportunities in the future and you can look at this as a learning experience. I know that's easy to say when you've just won the contest, but it's still true.
What gives me an edge, is that I've spent a huge amount of time learning about all the oracle-D guidelines. I've said this many times before, but it's just so important to keep in mind. I'm not the best writer out there, heck, I've received many criticisms from curators about errors in my articles. Usually it's about things that could've been fixed immediately by proper proofreading on my part. I try not to let these critiques get to me & I use them to do better next time.
I'll share some details of my workflow, hopefully that will help other people improve their work. It also shows the amount of effort & time I put into these tasks.
- I first start by putting together a scheme of the keywords I'm going to use throughout my post. I give them a ranking by importance. For this I just use pen and paper, it helps me to visualize things better.
- Before I start writing the article itself, I come up with around 5 different titles & pick the best one. This usually takes me around 15 minutes.
- After I've chosen the best title, I work on my featured image. For this I use the open-source image editor Gimp & I try to use my own materials as much as possible. I pay close attention to matching the right text colors with the right background colors.
- Still not writing my article at this point and usually more than an hour has passed. Now I figure out the structure I'm going to use. What am I going to write about? Which headers am I going to use? Stuff like that...
- Writing my introduction, I try to keep this short and enticing. I want people to read the rest of the article, so I don't add too much useless information.
- Now I'm finally writing the article itself, following the structure I've outlined beforehand. This can take a couple of hours & I find it fairly easy to do if my general article structure is sound.
- Throughout writing my article, I'm constantly adding images. I use a lot of screenshots, which I make using the open-source ShareX screenshot tool. I pay very close attention to naming them and adding captions, with special regards to the keywords I've listed on my scheme. I'm always making sure that my images/screenshots are not too big, I manually change the sizes of them, just so my readers don't have to scroll endlessly.
- I end my article with a compelling call to action - urging the reader to complete a specific task after they're done reading.
Check out my post on how to improve your writing for Oracle-D tasks!!
Feel free to contact me on Discord to get help with your writing for Oracle-D via Daan#4869
Offering Help to People!
While State of the Dapps 'Review a Media DApp' task was running, 
I quickly explained to her how to import Steem articles into Medium and did the same for
Aside from that, I know that Anouk applied some of the concepts I had explained in my latest post on how to improve your Oracle-D articles. So, I'd like to think that I've had a little bit of a hand in getting her to win this contest. Just a little bit, I know her writing is very good on its own ;-)
Conclusion
Participating with this contest has been a great experience overall. I'm not just saying that because I've won, but because I really enjoyed writing the article I've submitted.
SteemPeak also responded in the comment section of my article and that gave me a great deal of recognition as well. In the end, that's why I write these sorts of articles, to highlight some of the amazing DApps we have on our Steem platform!