My First 9 Days on SteemIt - Stats, Thoughts, and Words of Advice

Well fellow Steemians, I have been posting for officially nine days now. My first posts are beginning to pay out rewards, and I got my first curation reward as well. A week ago I didn't think I would want to do a post like this talking about SteemIt, but after my nine days of experience I have changed my mind.

Let me start with some of my statistics as of the writing of this post.

Posts: 17
ReSteems: 8
Comments Made: 31
Comments Received on My Posts: 36
Followers: 19
People I am Following: 46
Experience Level: 40
SteemPower: 2.027
SBD: $0.011
Account Value: $13.23

Don't let the SBD amount mislead you. I made SBD but have since used them.

My introduction post cashed out at $4.483 SBD + 0.650 SteemPower. Honestly, I was hoping for more, but found it can be hard to get attention when you are brand new, no matter how much you put into your intro post. Once I claimed the rewards for that post, I went and reinvested them. I used some of the voter bots to upvote one of my other posts which was two days away from paying out. It was my third post about the $2 bill, another post I put a lot of time into. In the end, it paid out $4.486 SBD + 0.694 SteemPower. As you can see, it didn't make any more in SBD, but that wasn't my goal. The goal all along was to increase my SteemPower.

I also had two video posts pay out already too. They only paid 0.973 SBD and 0.177 SteemPower combined.

My remaining open videos have a total pending payment of $9.57 plus a pending bot vote that hasn't registered yet.

I also received my first curation reward, which was a lot lower than I had expected. I was the first to upvote the post and commented on the post which led to a conversation of about 8-10 comments total between us. The post paid out $241.60 with $59.79 going towards curation rewards, with 92 upvotes and 35 comments. I know I upvoted earlier than 30 minutes, but most likely in under ten minutes. I now know that isn't ideal. I have decided curation rewards will look pretty bleak until I build up my SteemPower.

I also joined the Hive account@curie Guild. This is a group of curators who try to spot good posts and authors who are undervalued and don't see a lot of return on their posts yet. They will also pay you rewards for a post you submit that they accept. I do plan to take full advantage of that while helping others get noticed. I did hope that I could submit one of my own posts since I am currently remaining mostly unnoticed, but you can't submit your own post. I do have some great posts up already though. Hopefully one of my fellow Curators will spot one of them and submit me before I get noticed.

I totally admit I still don't really understand the math behind how the rewards are figured, and exactly how the voting bot numbers work, but I will figure it out or find a good informational post about it all at some point. Plus knowing the exact math isn't as important as putting in the work to make quality posts and the numbers should work themselves out.

I also didn't figure all of this out on my own. I have done a ton of Google searches this week. If you have a question, Google it! There is a wealth of information out there and I've seen so many articles and videos that have been helpful. But, if you really want to learn some great stuff about SteemIt, I highly recommend you go follow Hive account@jerrybanfield and Hive account@joeparys and review their past posts and videos. You might get lost in their feeds due to all the great information you will find, but the time you put into it will be worth it. Many of the things I mentioned above I learned from them. Also, if you decide to use the voting bots, I suggest you go read some of Hive account@yabapmatt posts. He is the one that created the Steem Bot Tracker which can be found at https://s3.amazonaws.com/yabapmatt/bottracker/bottracker.html

I still need to learn more about STEEM, SteemPower, and Steem Back Dollars and their differences and values, but I am well on my way to grasping all of that after just over a week.

My tip for using images is to use the site www.postimg.org and choose the Direct Link option for your images. For videos I have only figured out that you can click Share on a video there and copy the link. For embedding the videos, I am at a loss. It says the iframe command is unrecognized. For your coding you can use Google Markdown codes or HTML codes. I had previously taught myself the basics of HTML so I had a bit of a head start. However, the posting screen seems to more readily accept Markdown coding.

One of the most important bits of code for me is how to get my text to wrap around my images. That feature has always been an important part of my preferred layout for a blog post. You can put the following code inside the <> tags:

div class="pull-left" (at the start of your image link - if you want the photo on the right like the second SteemIt photo above simply change "left" to "right")
/div (after your image link)

My biggest piece of advice is read articles, watch videos, take in all the knowledge you can about SteemIt. You are going to make mistakes. When you do, or when you have questions about something, ask someone -- even if that someone is just Google who leads to someone who knows the answers.

Also, don't get discouraged or give up. You most likely aren't going to be one of the people who pulls in $500 for your intro post. You will probably stumble along for a few weeks before getting noticed much. But get out there, create good content, and find others to follow and comment on their posts. It will make it easier to build your own followers if you are out there talking to people.

Let me know what you think about my first week-plus review and feel free to ask any questions. I am new for sure, and there's lots of stuff I don't have a clue about, but I might have seen the answer to your question in my own studying if I don't actually know it.

I hope this helps you a bit!