Yeah, starting is hard. I said somewhere else that Steemit is about dedication, my first few hundred posts probably got next to no payout but as I posted more, more people started following. One thing I think that's quite useful are upvote bots. I use them to promote my posts to gain reach!

It is very frustrating when I see low quality content being promoted though, I try to promote my content based on quality. For example I think this post deserves to be seen so I boosted it a lot, whereas the other post I posted today was only boosted with 3 Steem, basically nothing haha