This is it, 365 days, 1 year later, still posting and writing comments, still learning, still trying to improve at every front.

Hive account@pundito had his day at the 7th January and made this post.

So in that style, let’s get back in Time and check my first post out.

The humble beginning. Memes.

2018-01-09 04:07:27 is the timestamp for my first elaborate meme on Hive account@dmania with the title

“What it feels like being new to Steemit“

You can find it here.

The account was already one day old back then, but I think I’m allowed to mark my first post as the start. I mean, getting the account and commenting is good, but actually posting is another step.

You will notice some key things:

• I had no clue about the difference between “Steemit” and “Steem”.
• I’m bad at memes.
• I got 0.32$ in upvotes.

New to Steem, first post and already some upvotes and a payout to look at. How?
No secret actually. The first thing I did back then, because I already knew that there was something like “Voting Power” and you shouldn’t keep it at 100%, was joining Hive account@shadowbot.
My profile was already running, my account upvoting other posts and so I received upvotes from them.

The Memephase and the Hunt for the Upvote.

The Upvote? Aren’t there many upvotes to catch? Yes there are, but I was thinking.

Source

Dmania was offering, over the Dmania bot, an upvote, for posts that hit trending. It seemed easy, because there were a lot of bad memes at that page. So I tried that. A lot actually. I read about upvote bots but didn’t realize that those bad memes actually are getting upvotes from those bots, pushing it to the trending page and then getting the big buck from the Dmania bot.

Also after a while I realized that Hive account@msp-shanehug is a thing. I read through the blog, through Hive account@swelker101 blog, and through the website. I got the impression that a small delegation of 1 SP would gather me a daily upvote from Hive account@msp-shanehug. So I did that.
This also brought me an upvote from Hive account@msp-lovebot. “Noice” was my thinking and to maximize the profit I started posting daily, still in the hope to get an upvote from Dmania.

Little did I know.

After a while, everything went well and I got a solid income from Hive account@msp-shanehug, I received my last vote on a Dmania meme. (A shared meme, a friend sent me. I was lazy that day.)

Hive account@swelker101 was redoing the script and tackled an issue: The minimum amount was 10 SP, not 1 SP, so logically, I dropped out. Without realizing I found a bug in the script and used that to get upvotes on my post. The change was necessary, the cut clean. Every account that was misbehaving was just removed without extra penalty. So I guess I was kinda lucky.

I already bought a lifetime membership at Hive account@feedyourminnows with the money I got from those upvotes, but it was not avoidable. Most of my posts dropped to 0$ again.

With that I needed a new plan.

The Hunt continues, a Challenge and an experiment.

Of course, I was still trying to catch that upvote. I’m persistent at least. But I tried to tackle some new income sources so I tried myself at the #memechallenge from Hive account@fibra59.

Also I found Hive account@steembasicincome. I started following that account at March 9 2018.

On one of those SBI posts I found Hive account@cryptictruth ‘s comment, looking for someone to sponsor, when they are sponsoring back. If you guessed, I think you got it right: I answered and got my first share through a Sponsor for Sponsor deal, without realizing it.
The comments from back then.

Shortly after that, on March 10, I already received the transaction from SBI that my enrollment was completed.
I finally got a scalable investment.

I even made a meme based on that.

With an investment plan to finally channel all of my liquid Steem, I kept on producing memes, while doing the meme challenge.

End of the Hunt, still Memes.

Thanks to a dispute on the Steem blockchain between Dmania’s creator Hive account@zombee and some other persons, Dmania was shutting down.
So I started moving my posts to other Memesites. DecentMemes.com (down by now, don‘t try it.) and memeit.lol (also down by now, do you see a pattern here maybe?)

memeit.lol was awesome though, thanks to the curation system I got regularly high upvotes from the memeit.lol account.

As all good things so far, this also had to end. The declining activity on memeit.lol and no development leaded to and end without upvotes.
The good news was, that Dmania was back online in a revised version.

Back to the roots.

That was a meme titel. I’m not even kidding. Without any alternative I started posting on Dmania again. Without the hope of getting the upvote.

That was the cycle for a while, posting daily on Dmania, throwing posts out for the meme challenge, buying votes on them and buying SBI shares.

Dead of the Memes. Birth of other random stuff.

The hope for the Dmania upvote was finally dead. And the 25% cut from Dmania was not helping. With that I discovered Hive account@dlike, posting stuff I find enjoyable and only 10% beneficiaries. Seemed perfect, so I shifted my posting activity from memes to random stuff.

There is a free game on Humble Bundle? Let’s post it! Finally found a good song on YT? Post! Some news that are interesting? You get the idea.

The last shift was now from Hive account@dlike to Hive account@dclick. The upvote from Hive account@dlike only recovered the 10% cut, Hive account@dclick has no beneficiaries. I’m able to provide my own format and it gives me the freedom to choose the first tag by myself.

End and the new Beginning.

Here I am now. After 365 days, also a lot of comments and posts, always trying to find the best ROI, after a lot of applications and sites. SBI is the best experience so far. Unlimited, fair and reliable. I’m glad that they are providing such a possibility. And thanks to !sbi status you can see in the comment below how far I already got with those units.

The last sponsor for sponsor deal I did is almost one week ago, but still active. The next post will be published as soon as I hit 10 Steem again.

I am convinced that Steem will be back to the top again as soon as the recovery begins. It’s not just a blockchain, it has a use case. That is much more than most of the other coins can provide.

So I’m buying more Steem, stuffing it directly into SP. Already did that with a smaller sum in the middle of the last year, but with that price it has to be more. Will take me some days to finish that transaction, it should bring me up quite a bit.

After all that, it’s now time to leave that trench and to move onward. Letting that newbie feeling behind, taking the experience to a new future which is better and richer than the past behind. Not giving up, not stepping back. Let’s go and let’s seize it.

From the Intro from Fallout 4. You should play that series. Starting from 1. Just a tip.

Thanks for reading through, though. Not a writer, never will be, not the goal. But there will be more sponsor for sponsor deals, I’m pretty sure of that.

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