Last night I was thinking of all the amazing community I've met here over the past 8 active months. Thinking about Xmas and how I could share a bit for all the newbie minnows that will hopefully join in Steemit platform in 2019.
Thinking about the endless hours of figuring out how to change a picture or post or send steem, I'd like to save you some time and exhaustion by sharing some important tips that hopefully can help you.
When I joined, it was a bit of experiment to see if I could actually use and convert the btc I had into actual every day life. After reading the FAQs page and guidelines there were and still are many other things to learn when it comes to blogging, photo editing, curation, delegation and using crypto.
Here are some tips for you that took me forever to figure out!
1 Introduce Yourself
This post should be a great one! This should be your 1st post! Put some time and effort into this, many people will see you from the start. I made an introduction post long after I started and learned later that, that should have been my first post! Make sure to put that in your title and as in tag section ; introduceyourself or you can use introducemyself. However, introduceyourself has 10 times the amount of payouts than introducemyself. Which leads me to the next tip.....
2 Tags
On your blog feed, on left side of page is a list of all tags, open that page should look like this
This is a portion of it, if you scroll down you can see how many posts, comments and payouts that pertain to each tag. This really helped me as I am completely new to the hashtag language. It helps you to think of new tags and you can of course create your own at any time. Something that I had to get my head around was that hashtags are for categories and @ are typically people or a group title. Life and blog are some of the biggest hashtags and Steemit tag has twice as many users as Steem hashtag. Using 1, 2 or 3 hashtags in front of text can make all text gradually bigger. It helps you to think of new tags and you can of course create your own at any time. Study these and use wisely for gaining some attention on platform. If you use a hashtag in blog those will be your tag titles up to 5 on every post.
3 Loading Pictures
I've noticed several newbies have sideways photos. When I first started it was a huge frustration of why it kept happening. What I discovered are several factors to remedy this. One, is make sure the device you are using is set to a closer picture size for steemit. 1680x1292px is the suggested size for the main photo of your blog post. Smaller images with the same 1.3:1 ratio also work well, like 840 x 646px. You can usually set your photo size in your camera or phone. I use a hp laptop and I have my regular picture folder and then I have Windows Photo Gallery, where I can edit photos, there I right click to re-size and or just save.. Many times, it's just a matter of saving the photo once again and doing nothing to it, in the editing page. Most the time when my photo would turn sideways it was because it was too big. I switched my camera setting to a smaller size and now I save them again to my desk top, a lot more time, but that works for me. So, if you are constantly getting the sideways photo, re-size smaller and re-save it in whatever program you are using and try re-loading it, should remedy this.
4 Avatar Picture
Your Avatar picture is super small. In settings you can upload picture and change this . I found a simple website that can take any picture and create url and resize. http://tinypic.com/ there are several of these out there. This one has worked well for me and is free. These dimensions width/height; for avatar, 400 X 400, 600 X 600, 1000 X 1000 can be used and or import picture into tiny pics website, get the url and upload in settings.
(some amazing steemian made this collage, please let me know who so I can credit?)
5 Cover/Banner Image
Creating a banner is fun once you have an easy program/app to use.
I found https://www.canva.com/ and never had created anything like this before. Super easy, free for most of it, you can pay for upgraded version. You can upload your own pictures, resize and play with it... I just made a new banner using it yesterday. 2048x512 is the recommended size of steemit cover banner. If you use the free version of canva. Use the 800x 534px banner template, seemed to work just fine for mine. When saving file, it will ask you to sign up for thirty days, ignore that and continue to save banner to your device. One thing I suggest is always save stages of creation. I kept loading a new banner and experimenting with background colors and templates until I liked one, good practice for creating a banner with a bit more energy to it.
6 Discord
This is a chat room server that is connected to Steemit. If you have questions regarding tech, apps, groups, delegation, you more than likely will find it there. You may get invited to a channel by which a group has created a server and within that channel you can text or type chat. Its basically a fast way to meet most active members and even whales and developers are there. If you install on computer, make sure to restart your computer then it should work properly. You can join here if you have a steemit account, discordapp.com . If you enjoy a specific group on Steem, they might have their own server chat room, so reach out to peeps on steemit for invites. Within discord there are links for all kinds of live radio shows that are popping up and discussion forums too! If you join make sure to read rules for each channel, some of them require a delegation to join their chat room others none. Some of my favorites are 
7 External Apps to Grow Your Following
I know there are many external apps that are attempting to help minnows and people gain following and now to gain exposure for steemit platform. For the last 8months I've used steem engine and steem follower if you would like to check them out I have referral links at bottom of this page. These are external voting platforms linked to steemit. You have limits of upvotes per day and you need to use steemconnect app to be able to sign in to both of these platforms. So far, I've found some doozy of human being on these pages!
On steemfollower once you log in using steemconnect go to services tab, drop down manual curation, once that page opens you have 5 categories to vote in. It will tell you how many votes you have per day, the worth etc all on right side of page. On steemengine it's about the same thing, just log in and hit the vote tab and you can vote for peeps.. If you open a blog post on either you can hit link straight back to steemit platform and comment and upvote there as well.
8 Share2Steem Cross Posting App
Share2Steem is a super cool new project that I learned about one morning on discord and the 
9 Memos sending/receiving/reading
So, for quite some time I had to wrap my head around how to transfer funds in this platform. If you go to your wallet and scroll to bottom of page this is where people's history of transfer sp or sd to you. When doing this you need to use your master/active key and always delete from history. You typically always want to sign in only using your POSTING key, however for money transactions and delegation you need a stronger private key and it will say which one. Most of all the memos I get are from bot services? What are bot services and why to use them or not. There are quite a few mixed opinions out there regarding this and the last hard fork, my understanding got rid of a lot of that spam bot system. I sent a tiny bit to a bot one day to see if it was a viable. I didn't really notice much, if you are going to play the bot system which many do, I recommend looking at the bot page and it's wallet history and what and how it is involved on this platform. Does it have a purpose, like a not for profit theme/cause, or is it just autobot upvote thing? I personally recommend reaching out to real community and building organic real followers and not sending every bot offer under the sun pennies. The memo section of any transfer is where you can write a message, I know that sounds obvious, but it wasn't to the tech challenged lol!
10 Delegation
For the newbie this is quite tricky. For me after 8 months, I still sit and think, what does this mean again? Well, my understanding now, is like you have shares of a stock and you give power to a c.e.o. to do what he/she thinks best with that stock for the health of the company. So you are basically giving over a certain amount of your Steem Power to a group or project you either believe in, or want to invest in and in many cases you get an instant return of payouts. Many newbies won't have enough SP to even think about, however, others might come in with lots of Steem Power and would like to help the platform stay healthy and financially viable. I think for most minnows, once you've reached over 100SP in your account then think about delegating to a group you are involved in. One thing I just learned is that you can take back your delegation at any time. I have yet to do this, but say for example you delegated some Steem Power to a contest and now the contest is over and you want your delegation back, I found a great "how to undelegate" post here
https://steemit.com/steemit/@raised2b/how-to-undelegate-steem-power-in-4-easy-steps by 
Okay Minnows, hope this helped someone today, most all these tips are found in FAQ page, however, I wanted to share a bit of what I was challenged with and give you some resources to make blogging fun and inspiring.
Happy Holidaze and Blessings,
New Amazing Cross Post App , my referral link
https://www.share2steem.com/?ref=kimmysomelove42
Want more followers? these two sites have helped me find peeps and build bigger following
https://old.steemfollower.com/?r=16189
https://steemengine.net/join?r=3935
Or better yet, get paid to search the web, this site is fast and amazing!
Lend your voice to this amazing inspiring group of humans!