It took me some time, but I've finally reached 500 followers. It's been 4 months since I've written my first article on Steemit and I'm overall very happy with my progress on this great platform. With this personal blog post, I'd like to share some of the methods I've used to grow on Steemit. It goes without saying that I'm extremely grateful to anyone that has enjoyed my content so far.
using Gimp - Steem logo from Wikimedia500 Followers!
This number should be taken with a grain of salt, since I've noticed a lot of these followers seem to be bots that have been running rampant these past couple of days. Nevertheless, I imagine that the real number is pretty close to that. It took me 4 months (since my first blog post), to reach this milestone. Not particularly fast, I assume, but I think it's pretty good, considering I haven't been posting every day.
The number of followers seems to be a better indicator of growth than reputation, at least in my case. I tend to make limited use of vote-buying to get my posts a little bit more noticed, so my reputation would be affected by that.
Curation Groups, Friends & Post Promotion
I've been proactively looking for ways to get some more interaction on my content. These past months, I've joined a number of curation groups and have devised a strategy on how to use bots effectively. By doing this, I've met some great people along the way, whom I try to give some support myself.
It's pretty hard to come up with a list of all the people who have supported me so far. I've had tons of interesting discussions in the comment section under my or their posts. I'd like to offer a big THANK YOU to all those people!
My First Steemit Meetup
This Wednesday, I'll be attending my first small Steemit meetup! I found out there was another Steemian living in my hometown, 
Giving Back
Recently, I've leased 5000 SP through Minnowbooster, which I'm using to give out some support to other people. I tend to go through some of the Discord promotion channels and pick out content that I personally like. It is not my goal to try and make a profit from this, though I am using some votes on my own articles (never comments).
It gives me such a good feeling when I can upvote people who haven't earned much on Steemit. There's definitely a need for people who do manual curation, so I'm more than happy to do my part. The next couple of days, I'll be looking into also using steemlookup.com to find some content that I can upvote.
Conclusion
I'm pretty amazed to see how much progress I've made in the last couple of months. Once you start exploring all the different communities that exist within Steemit, you'll understand the potential that Steemit has. It took me some time to figure out that networking might be the most important aspect to make it here.
If you're just living in your own bubble and not take the time to read other people's posts, you're missing out on a big part of the experience. This is something I'll always try to keep in mind, even if I grow to become a whale some day. I can dream, right...
