Overview:
My short term goal is to have a core of 5,000 SP staked on this account.
I'm currently at 3,600 SP, all earned the hard way since August 23, 2017.
That's a lot of effort for 3,600 SP, but I've had fun.
The current value of the remaining 1,400 Steem is $721.
I could easily buy this to be practical, but I've stuck to my guns to earn ALL of my Steem to fully appreciate it, understand the Steem ecosystem with humility, and be in tune with others I've bonded with on the ground floor.
Yea, it's a really really ridiculous, but I made a deal to manually mine it all. ::Cough cough::
Short Background:
If I kept the liquid earnings I've sold for USD, other tokens, or my SteemFest ticket, I'd have well over 5,000 Steem now. I've technically hit my goal in Steem earned a long time ago, but it doesn't count because it's not all staked now.
While most liquid earnings were traded for crypto, I sold some SBD for ~$1,100 USD during a bull run to have something to show for my effort as cash, plus proof of concept to my friends/family. Since I have no risk and also locked in a modest clip of green no matter what happens, I can only win from here.
I've never powered down and haven't used any bid-bots except Minnowbooster a few times back in August/Sept of 2017 for a little pride on my undiscovered posts. I generally don't like shortcuts or artificially inflating the perceived value of my content.
Curation Game Plan:
I earn at least 1 Steem/day from dedicated auto-curation. The rest of my curation is random when manually voting, but it obviously adds up to more.
For simplicity, I'll assume that I'll get 365 Steem/year from my auto-curation at a bare minimum, not factoring in any compounding.
Therefore, if I never logged in again and key authors didn't leave, it'd likely take me at most 3.853 years to get to 5,000 SP.
This may sound absurd because it's only $721 now, but I made this stubborn pact with myself. There were plenty of times I considered shocking some people with an investment to prove why you shouldn't judge people based on their SP, but I always talked myself out of it.
Content Creation Game Plan:
As of today, I believe that I've made 985 blog posts and 7,006 comments and since August 23, 2017.
The averages across 564 days are 1.75 posts and 12.42 comments per day. I generally like to post twice a day.
Recent support from a generous whale has boosted my posts of out the sub $1 world to give me renewed hope of reaching my goal much sooner, but nothing is a given.
I can't estimate how much I'll make as an author, but we all know that manually accumulating Steem takes time. I'll plan on grinding it out with my posts and try to improve my content to do what I can to succeed.
A newer focus is spreading out my upvote to far more newer contacts and commenting on their posts to build new relationships, or simply spark life into older ones. This should provide a boost in satisfaction and fun from new engagement, new people to meet, and increase my rewards.
I don't have any set targets of comments to make per day because I want to keep things fun, but I do want to get aggressive to level up around here. It's no fun being stuck at a plateau you've made and forced upon yourself, so I want to prove to myself that this was the right strategy over time.
I also do need to adopt dtube more. I've dabbled and gotten on their radar a few times, but my videos are often drum performances and they vanish off the platform after a few months. This deters me from posting more because I'd rather have a history people can search in the long run, than posts for decent rewards that disappear shortly after.
Networking:
I've gotten involved in a curation group and am getting more active in Discord.
I went to SteemFest 3 and will go to the next one.
I'm going to the Global Block Builders Conference in Austin next month.
Gradually spearhead meetups in my city. It's crazy that we don't have them here yet, but there don't seem to be a lot of Steemians around my area.
Partner up with people to build something on the chain since I don't have technical skills. However, I do have two business degrees and lots of professional skills I'm not using here yet.
Timeline:
Hit this goal by August 23, 2019, my two year mark, 166 days away.
If I make it, great. If I miss it, it won't be for lack of effort and hustle.
The Math:
1,400 Steem Power in 166 days is 8.43 Steem/day.
This is fair number at the rate I earn, but I'm one to hustle when I have a target.
With the curation rate above of 1 Steem/day in play, the amount of Steem left to actively earn would be 1,234 SP, currently worth $635.51 today.
This leaves me needing 7.43 Steem/day to hit 5,000 SP by my goal date.
I think it's doable as long as I hustle with my commenting and branching out. I can't rely on any recent upvote activity and will assume that it'll always be a pleasant bonus whenever it comes through.
The Next Level:
The next goal with be 10,000 SP. I think that's a practical sum to hold for the long run and to be able to leverage for curation and delegation in the future. My hope is that the network effect will kick in once I make this next push to 5K, so it'll be easier to get to this goal than the first one.
I should be on my way with this by the time SteemFest rolls around and will be open-minded to approaching new strategies and relationships to help me get there and beyond.
That's it for now. If you have any insight or opinions, feel free to share. This is more of a roadmap for me to hold myself accountable.
Thanks for checking this out and for all of your support so far,
P.S. - I'm also moving all rewards to be 100% powered up (or will power them up if I forget) for the time being.