Q2 2019 Steem Experience Report (Part 1)

Another quarter is in the books and with each one that passes the opportunity to learn, adapt, and adjust comes as well. Given some of the upcoming changes with Hard Fork 21, these exercises of reviewing our experiences and results will become more important for those seeking to build their accounts and leverage the shifts that will continue to occur within an ecosystem that continues to rapidly evolve and development with a strong and passionate community like the one we have here on Steem.

Personally, this was a quarter of changes for me as I took the step to take some time off from the ecosystem while I enjoyed a great family vacation. However, I continue to find ways to integrate my passion of Steem in my daily life so I continued to create content while on vacation to share my experiences and memories achieved during that time. I ultimately have all of the author rewards back via SBIs in appreciation of following that journey which has given me some new light regarding my engagement moving forward. It has resulted in lower than usual engagement as I am still adjusting my time available with the time I want to allocate to my passions like Steem. I hope to finalize a sort of schedule to follow in the coming days as I think I am ready to make commitments once again.

This clearly impacted my metrics from Hive account@abh12345’s Curation and Engagement League which had the opportunity costs of a couple of Steem but it also have me plenty of perspective as I was still finding myself on the leaderboard which if I am not mistaken still places me in the top 25 percentile of users sign up to participate. I have committed to making a return and feel that the foundations have been set to do so in the following weeks in July. It also helped me realize that being present is still extremely important but it does not mean losing sleep to always be up to date with ones feed. We are all human and understand that life gives us all curveballs we need to attend to so I have not seen the drop of engagement drop any key metrics.

An example of this is my Hive account@steem-ua score which has remained on a steady improvement this quarter that got me into the Top 500 in the platform! While I think it had more to do with what was going on around the community with more and more leaving the project, I think it also shows the power of consistency. While I have seen an unexpected drop this month (July so will be part of Q3 report), I continue to be encouraged with my approach with engaging and creating content with the community.

This has continued to make other important metrics I follow to continue in the right direction. Reputation is approaching 67 which is encouraging as these levels still require quite a bit of work and engagement. The fact that followers have now exceeded 1,100 has helped with many metrics as I have now made over 700 posts and 13,000 comments! This puts me at very active averages even though one daily post is just the Proof of Activity for Hive account@actifit. However, I have continued to commit to post every day. It was quite a challenge this quarter given my two week European vacation but it was certainly achieved; although it was quite expensive given roaming and wifi charges! However, some of those costs were offset given the results of earnings this quarter and cumulatively.

The power of compounding continues to demonstrate itself with my account as my earnings this quarter was about $784 (in USD). It also puts my cumulative earnings over $2,500 and demonstrates that every quarter is growing although a portion this quarter benefited from improved prices in Steem and SBD. With the latest decline in prices, these earnings trends have slowed down as the last 7 and 30 days are lower that the monthly average of the quarter.

However, the source and diversification of my earnings continues to improve substantially as some activities and delegations to certain projects continue to provide great ways to earn and build my account. Some have started to accelerate such as Steem Monsters and Splinterlands as tournaments continue to expand and rental markets for cards continue to gain traction. I also started an experiment during my vacation to try Vote Selling to ensure that my Voting Power is always put to us during my downtime. I can now understand why some accounts with an investor mindset could take the approach to only create passive income with Vote Selling as it seemed to be an interesting way to earn on the protocol. While I have since been selling less, I have left it on for those rare moments my Voting Power gets too high.

Part 2 will go into some of the details on how my earnings have continued to diversify and have implications for growing my Steem Power! Stay tuned!