Your Most Valuable Asset
Some people might think that age, occupation or Steem Power is your most valuable asset on Steem, or that these things will have an immediate and crucial impact on your own success... It's wrong. Well, a better word for it might be half-true.
All of these things can and will help you on your journey, but these are tools and characteristics. A great combination of these things will eventually help you to maximise your results. However, they are not to be considered the most important assets you have. It's up to each user to put them into action and to find the best ways to use them, but your most valuable asset on Steem is your audience.
I have said that numerous times before, and even though I have always believed in those words, Steem went downhill (not only in terms of value) for a long period of time and it actually went so far that I was almost convinced at one point, that I had been wrong during my entire time on Steem. Luckily, I was right and #newsteem along with HF21 has proved that.
With HF21 came manual curation into play once again, and we can see that many users who previously used auto-votes or delegated their stakes to bid-bots have started to curate content, manually. While some people will take this opportunity to maximize their curation rewards at all times, others have started to "spread the wealth" across the platform.
This ultimately means that even though people might autovote like before, many of them are looking for new authors to curate, just like anyone who is eager to manually curate content. All of them are looking for new authors and more quality contributions, which gives you a superb chance to score some new followers.
The bigger audience, or the more followers you have, the higher the chance to receive upvotes, which obviously leads to more rewards. The more rewards you earn, the more will the users who votes on your content earn, so it's a win/win situation for everyone. Especially as you with time, when your followers have realized how awesome your content is, might be given larger votes. Growth plays a major role here, and not only in terms of your own stake. The growth of your audience is vital for your success too.
A 100% upvote from a super-whale would be truly amazing and it would have an immediate and epic impact on your rewards. The thrilling and satisfiying feeling from such a vote would be wonderful, but it doesn't last long.
Those 100% upvotes might actually hurt you more than anything because you will quickly realize that you are back to square one again. Waiting and longing for another vote... A vote that might never appear again.
The short-term rewards from such a vote, the "bonus" rewards it gives you might help you in various ways or boost your self-confidence and motivation at first, but what happens when you actually realize that it was a "once in a lifetime thing?" - You will feel more unmotivated than ever and you will quickly be filled with despair, which ultimately turns into anger.
- What happens next?
Your anger will make you focus on the negative sides of literally everything. You will compare yourself with other authors, you will compare your contributions with others and you will eventually leave.
- Who gets affected by that?
Do you think that anyone besides yourself will be affected by your decision to leave Steem? - There are other users out there to reward even if you leave, so your decision to leave doesn't affect anyone but yourself.
- Do you really want to give up because of an upvote that never came your way more than once?
I don't think so. That would be short-term thinking in a nutshell. You are in this for the long haul. You need to think long-term. You need to think of Steem and your journey as a marathon and not a sprint.
For each of your contributions you stand a chance to gain new followers. You have a chance to grow your audience and that is long-term thinking. You need to build your presence, and that is done by hard work, time and effort. You need to contribute and make a name for yourself.
- That's how you grow an audience.
Your audience is an irreplaceable asset. It's your most valuable asset. You can power down and cash out Steem Power, you can study and learn new things but you can't replace your followers. Once you have them, you need to treat them with respect and you need to show them that you are grateful. You need to be trustworthy.