Hello Steemers! Thanks for checking out my latest post. I've officially wrapped up my first week (active) on the site and man has it been a journey! I've probably spent more time on this site (reading & posting) than I have doing anything else and I wanted to take a moment to reflect and share with everyone a few lessons that I've learned up to this point.

3 important lessons learned after my first week on Steemit

#3. Making money isn't easy.

Don't get me wrong - I didn't think I'd walk in here and start making $5,000 posts. However, the fact I own an online marketing company and help clients every day with creating content & SEO made me think I had an upper hand as a rookie. Perhaps a bit of the Dunning-Kruger effect has taken place but it didn't take me long to realize making money here isn't as easy as I thought.

I put some serious sweat equity into a couple posts this week and while my expectations were low (hoping to make $5-$25) I was a little surprised when I capped out my best post with a grand total of $0.31. I had 1 post I put about 6 hours into total (between mapping out the content, writing the content, proof reading & creating graphics) and actually got $0.00. It was a bit of a kick in the ass but I've used it as motivation to try and follow-up with even stronger content.

#2. You don't have to be a steemit pro to make big bucks.

Just 2 days ago I got my brother Hive account@timcliff and his partner Hive account@artist1989 to join the site (woohoo!). Hive account@artist1989 really makes some kick ass content so I KNEW he'd get some positive feedback on the site. What I didn't imagine is that he'd have a $1,000 post on his first day on the site. It was awesome and I'm super happy for him - and what it taught me was sometimes even a simple, fun video is all you need sometimes to grab the attention of the right upvotes.

#1. If you focus on the money - you will NOT have a fun time.

It's hard to completely ignore the fact any post you make COULD lead to a big payout, yet I realized after focusing only on that for the first few days -- is not the right approach. Like a lot of people I lurked for a couple days and kept seeing all these $500 posts, $5,000 posts, $15,000 posts!! and was finally like "all right - that's it!! I'm joining this website." From that point forward my mindset was that of "how can I make a $5,000 post".

Perhaps the SEO guy in me was approaching this website like Google's algorithm. I was thinking if I can only crack the code - I'll be rich. Wrong mindset! Before joining steemit I was on Reddit almost everyday. Yet I never made a single post with the attitude of "I need to get some upvotes." Because of the money aspect to steemit - I was hyper focused on trying to succeed financially. Yet after initially failing I went back to reddit and realized I was having a way better time. Why is that? Because I didn't care about upvotes. I just posted when it was relevant and said what was on my mind. Thankfully I was able to do a 180 and come back to this site with a similar mindset and since then feel like I'm having a way better time.

If there is one piece of advice I could share with other newbies to the site it would be not to think about the money. I know that's hard to do and it's always going to be in the back of your mind but coming from experience if you aim to make money - you won't have a good time. If you aim to have a good time - you probably will and who knows... maybe make a little STEEM along the way ;)

Thanks for reading my post tonight. I'd love to hear from other newbies out there what you've learned on this site so far. If you have an extra moment please share in the comments below. Thanks!