The success of steem
As someone who has been a part of STEEM for almost one year now, I think we can all agree that the success of STEEM depends very much on how well received the platform is by the general audience, and mainstream adoption hopefully in the coming future.
As early adopters, we want to see the steemit community grow as much and as fast as possible, and one of the best ways we can do this is by making a collective effort to spread the word and recruit those closest to us, as smartly as possible.
Over time, I managed to succesfully recruit a good number of friends. I think I am getting pretty good at it, and this article's purpose is to help you profit from my experience so you can recruit your friends, get them to stay, and give them the most chances in the STEEM game even if you are not a huge whale yourself.
My padawans
Here are the current stats of the friends I consider 'succesfully converted'.
This is an old friend of mine from France, who already shared my interest in Bitcoin and Crypto before, so it was logical to inform him about STEEM on the next day after I discovered it.
I recruited this friend while on a trip to Poland. Young user, who is mostly used to mobile devices, and who had absolutely no idea about cryptocurrency / cryptography before steem. Dogs don't go to school, you know.
A friend from Turkey with whom I play some DotA games. He begs for money often. 6 months ago I gave him 20$ on Poloniex, that he grew to $300 and recently converted it all to STEEM Power.
A business partner from Singapore. I have been talking to him about crypto for a while, but he never bought bitcoins because he was 'waiting for the right time', but prices have been growing steadily, so here he is on STEEM instead.
Now that the personas are introduced, I will make a list of the most common obstacles that my friends encountered.
The Language Barrier / Bad English people
As you can see, I recruited on many different countries/continents! All my internet friends usually speak English, but 
Solution
- Try to get them to speak English! Seriously. It's quite an easy language.
- Tell them to use the tags for their native languages. fr for french, es for spanish, kr for korean, cn for chinese, and so on.
- If they want to post in broken English, they can. But it should be very graphical. For example
Your friends will try to argue that they will get less rewards if they don't post in English, because all the posts in the Trending page are in English at the moment. While they are right that they will get less visibility, they will also get much less competition for articles in their language! A lot of languages already have active tags and can get some very decent rewards for the actual competition.
Also, we need to keep in mind that as the STEEM ecosystem grows, more and more tools will be translated into multi-language (steemit I'm looking at you). Also I need to mention it, the mobile app eSteem by 
The $0 Syndrome
"My posts don't make anything, I am getting no traction" is a feeling a lot if not all of newbies experience here on STEEM. It will happen to most of your friends. I remember 
Solution
- Ask your friends how many likes they got on their first facebook posts. Or other social networks. It should be enough to make them realise that Rome wasn't built in a day
- Upvote your friends - ALWAYS. They will see you are active on the site and understand you want to 'teamplay' with them. Trust is worth money and with already-made friends it's even easier.
- Resteem your friends when you believe they pushed themselves on an article. If you have a lot of followers, it should give them some increased exposure and help them grow faster
- Get your friends to join the #minnowsupport, more on that later in the article
"It's all about NETWORKING 1!!!"
I'm looking at you 
While this part is very true, it is also true for any other social media, or life itself. If your friends are either :
- blaming bots / curation guilds
- blaming whales for not upvoting them
- calling STEEM a lottery game
- saying they don't want to suck #@!$ to get votes
Then they might be in denial after their lack of success. It's a very normal human thing. As a guide, your role is to not let them fall into that mind trap. Truth is they just need to network more to get more exposure.
This data from reddit (which has similar interactions than steemit) shows us that there is about 9 comments per root post. A lot of newbies on STEEM will forget about this aspect of the platform, and concentrate on their own posts. Bad Strategy.
Solution
- Force your friends to do AT LEAST 9 comments for each article they publish. Of course it shouldn't be retarded comments like all 'nice article plz check out my blog' (like the guy I gave 3 downvotes to earlier). They should try to build a real connection and convert this person (or others who might read it) into a follower. Tell your friends that comments can earn money as well!
- If commenting goes well, chances are your friends might want to talk in private with a STEEM user one day. In which case, a lot of people are on SteemIt.Chat, including myself.
- If your recruited friends don't know each other (my case here), send them the link of the profile or an article of your other friends once in a while until they follow each other and become direct friends through STEEM.
- Force them to improve what they are doing. Explain to them that with good quality and consistency, their articles will get more and more votes on average and maybe end up getting autoupvoted by a bunch of big whales looking for curation rewards.
- Tell them not to focus too much on how much money was made each day. Tell them to count how many total interactions they had in total today on the network (incoming votes, outgoing votes, resteems in/out, comments received on their articles, comments posted by themselves, chats on steemit.chat). Money comes with time...
Should I invest into this? Where can I buy Bitcoins ?!
Your friends might be lost in the crypto-jungle right now. They will probably have a lot of questions, maybe even mentioning 'mining' or some dark stuff of the 20th century. DO NOT PANIC.
Solution
Show what these websites offer to your friends:
- LocalBitcoins
- Bitcoin ATMs Map
- Coinbase
- Poloniex
That should be enough for them to understand this is not a real obstacle, they can do it the way they want. However, remember them to never gamble what they cannot afford to lose. Of course, because it is in your own personal interest (your friends will most likely upvote you), you should be praising STEEM on how good of a blockchain it is:
- Graphene Blockchain Technology: 60 billions transactions per millisecond
- Zero-Fees transactions
- 4 seconds blocks
- Open Source
- Easy addresses for sending money (
instead of 1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH)
Congratulations, your friends will now commit real money into STEEM, most likely power it up and get even more addicted (at least for 13 weeks). You can consider this a great success.
Minnow Support
My latest padawan 
I've tried it as well and I must say it is good for new users. Every 10 hours, minnows can easily get a strong vote from bots, and it's almost free (one time registration fee of 0.002 STEEM). I'm getting my padawans to use it, it will probably help a bit with their zero dollar syndrome.
To join this new steem it 'hack'/'exploit'/'revolution', you just need to join the discord server, and follow the pinned messages instructions. In the current state, I believe 
In opposition to this 'basically free' tool, we have recently witnessed the rise of what I believe to be a much harder abuse of the system: 
Finally, thanks to their higher understanding of STEEM and crypto, your padawans will start achieving moderate success. When they are getting comfortable/cocky, send them this guide, and ask them to recruit a few friends themselves. But be really patient about it, there is no point of them starting to recruit new users if they cannot answer all basic questions, it would only confuse new users even more and they might think something wrong about STEEM and never come back.
Feel free to tag your own padawans in the comments and explain what went wrong with them, more experience can only help us all.
Upvotes/Resteems always welcome of course.