Hey everyone,
I recently finished writing a long guide on how to get better results on SOLA which you can check out if you use SOLA which I recommend: https://sola.ai/scottcbusiness/getting-better-results-on-sola-ZGRhYzB
I also did a guide shortly after on getting better results on Minds: https://www.minds.com/scottcbusiness/blog/better-results-on-minds-940440324919697408
Now it's time to write a blog on getting better results for Steem! Let's jump into it though shall we? I will be structuring it similarly to the way I did it on SOLA and use the similar headers and the same general template. You will also find overlap on the more general advice like media quality.
Unfortunately we don't have poll options on Minds so feel free to comment your answer to this poll and the poll at the end by commenting "1. answer 2. answer." We all appreciate your feedback to get a better feel for the community's position and feelings on these things.
POLL #1:What's the most important to you when deciding to engage someone's post?
- Entertainment
- Brings Value To You
- Expertise
- Media quality
- Other (explain in comment)
Why Even Listen To Me
I started using Steem near the beginning of the year and started to legitimately track progress in March of 2018. The reason why you may want to listen to my advice is because I've done fairly well considering the short time I've been here. You can see my manually collected analytics below and make your own judgments. Mind you, I don't think metrics determine whether or not you have very sound advice since you can boost with bid bots if you have money. However, there are many things you can do to improve your profile, your content, and your interactions and I'd love to share them with you now.
Profile Quality
Now profile quality isn't as big of a deal on Steem as it is on other platforms because there is very little you can modify, but you still have your basics like profile picture, short bio, location, website and your cover photo. Outside of this you need to really focus on your posts since you can't share a ton of information on your profile itself. This is why I always shared all my contact information at the end of each blog because it will be harder to find otherwise.
So again, ensure you've used a great shot of yourself or your great image of your logo for your profile. Unlike most websites you have to submit it via a URL so I use Imgur to upload my cover and profile picture. For your cover I've read the best resolution is 2561x223, but I've yet to see an official release of what the recommended size is. Keep in mind it will look drastically different between mobile and desktop. For example my cover is optimized for desktop users and more specifically for D.Tube users because every interface differs so it's impossible to have one perfect cover that fits all your audiences. That's probably your biggest challenge with the varied platforms is just how your banner changes on each and will only look aesthetically pleasing on a smaller fraction of the interfaces so ensure that at very least you're targeting the platform your audience uses the most. Given we're talking about audiences and what they want, please let me know if you tend to read and consume my content mostly on Steemit or DTube or wherever and whether it's on mobile or on a computer.
You can see above that my Steemit cover fits decently (this screenshot doesn't show it all), but the profile area is harder to read whereas with DTube below, the cover fits well and doesn't cover anything because they've set up their display differently.
Something I think that is also worth mentioning is that you should try to respond to as many commentators as possible. Interestingly enough, I've gotten flack for this as people have accused me of indulging spammers, though I give the benefit of the doubt. If someone posts blatant spam like links or some obvious I will delete it or not engage, but I'll still drop a "thanks" if someone says something as simple as "Hi, nice."
I think you're much better off accidentally indulging some spammers than you are ignoring and neglecting your audience, but you tell me in the comments below! I've also been accused of only being successful because of a wave of spam that affected the entire platform, so it would seem interesting to me that somehow I have been the largest beneficiary of this spam and it's not just the fact that I put a lot of effort and work into my content, but hey people will try to discredit anything you do these days.
Media Quality
Since I do my own graphic design I've gradually gotten better and near the beginning of the year I redid all of my graphic design templates and styles and revamped everything with new photos with a higher resolution too. It makes a difference and when you can create nice quality high resolution graphics people will notice and appreciate it too. It's not required, but it shows the extra effort. Same goes with video editing and time spent with descriptions or writing which we will cover next. If you want better results, make better quality content and that definitely includes visuals. Like I said before again for this if you don't have the capabilities or don't want to invest in learning you can use Fiverr and get very inexpensive graphic design done. Obviously it's less affordable to do this for every post so it's best to think long term. You can also negotiate with them for bulk deals etc. Let me know if this is something you need.
Post Structure
It is important that your post is structured well. Learning and understanding post structure is a bigger challenge on Steem because of HTML markup for blogging on Steemit, but many platforms offer different advantages and styles to alleviate this.
I will say that markup isn't too hard to learn since it's fairly basic, but most people don't want to try to figure out all this new stuff so I'd suggest just trying one of the other major platforms like busy.org, zappl, or depending on what you want to use Steem for you may want to try DTube (video platform) or Steepshot (instagram replica).
You can share videos just by dropping the link here, but it's only for major platforms like YouTube or Vimeo (who banned me). So if you are trying to upload native video to the blockchain I would recommend DTube. There are many options I am sure, but I've always used DTube so that is why I recommend it. It has the community and support behind it to make it awesome. You can navigate there via https://d.tube/
Keep in mind, most of my posts are in fact videos and I have some blogs. The reason is simple. It takes less effort to record the vlog than it does to write it all out plus it's faster for other people to digest it. The time crunch is with editing and that's why I tend to do uncut video for 5-20 minutes and keep it to the point and then have discussion in the comments. When we are talking about blogs though, whether you prefer writing or want to change it up a bit as I suggest you should, you must be more conscious of post structure to be successful.
So for Steem blogs, like any blog site you want to be taking advantage of the different style options you have available to you like using catchy or informative titles, headers for emphasis and to help people navigate, bold and italics to help emphasize key information, linking where possible, and including media. Also make sure to utilize alignment and block quotes to make us of the full range of features available to you.
A brief explanation of how HTML markdown works and how it's different from regular markdown: https://steemit.com/markdown/@r5yn1r4/code-in-markdown-vs-code-in-html-steemit
Post Publishing
Below is what this looks like when I was writing it out.
When you're actually going to publish your post you have to set your tags that you want to use, how you want to receive your rewards and you're ready to post!
You can set your author rewards to either decline payout (typically for charity etc.), you can take 50% in SBD and 50% in SP, or you can fully power up. If you don't know how Steem currency and stake works you should take a look at this: https://cryptoglobalist.com/2018/04/21/steem-steem-understanding-steemit-steem-power-sp-and-steem-dollars-sbd/
So for your tags you want to use tags that are being used, but you don't want to spam on tags that aren't relative to what you're talking about so as you can see I'm tagging: steem, blog, steemit, education, and community which I felt all directly relate to what I'm talking about here. You want to ensure you're using tags that have regular viewers so you can check out all the existing tags here: https://steemit.com/tags
I also suggest having a signature with your information and everything people might need to get in touch due to the limitations of the profile and inability to pin a post that might have that information.
Post Promotion
This one is small, but also somewhat controversial. You can do basic boosting using the 
I would instead suggest if you were seriously trying to get seen, to use bid bots. Now I may get flack for this, but realistically people have been using these forever and it's very challenging to get seen without them nowadays. Mind you, Steem is pretty low right now, so general use of bid bots has died down since you're probably going to lose money, whereas previously you could bid and get awareness and even some profits.
If you do want to try out bid bots I warn you, you may lose money but you can get more awareness. Check out: https://steembottracker.com to learn more. They also have a delegation manager there where you can lend your Steem power to others via delegation. Check out my blog on this here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@scottcbusiness/steembot-tracker-upvote-bot-tracker
I have another one as well: https://steemit.com/steemit/@scottcbusiness/front-running-bid-bots-on-steembot-tracker-earning-more
POLL #2: Out Of What I've Shared What Was The Most Important For You?
- Profile Quality
- Media Quality
- Post Structure
- Post Publishing
- Post Promotion
- None (explain in comment)
Let me know what you think of all this and how accurate you felt it was. Let everyone know if there's something big that I missed and I will add it! Thanks for reading all the way to here :)
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