Today marks my 100th day on this platform and it has been a great journey, connecting with new people and making a difference in people's lives. 100 days seems so long a time but you would be getting there soon or you probably have passed. It seemed just like yesterday when I was being invited by 
Working on the go with my STEEM acquired laptop computer trying to represent Steemit everywhere in Ghana,
that was in Yendi
In celebration of my 100 days I will like to give tips to my fellow Plankton and newbies in order that they may be motivated at the same time acquire a new set of self believe and sense of direction in their STEEM journey.
It is not always all cozy for anyone except may be your girlfriend or boyfriend happened to be a whale before you joined, lol. Check these five points and try to implement it if you haven't already, it is my hope that this may change your STEEM experience for good!
1. Know that Steemit is not a get rich quick scheme and it is never easy, you will get lonely.
One of the most important things to know is that at a point in time the journey will get very lonely. When you started, your introduction article might have had some good interactions and you are like wow! You are gingered up to post your next article. But then when you posted it probably took an hour or two for you to see a single view on your article and then you get another upvote to total of $0.02, your own vote inclusive.
Now you are feeling it, and you go ahead to post your next few articles. If you are lucky you get to join a community and you also get some random upvotes.
Well, that is the usual cycle and then just when you think you are rising steadily the upvotes stop coming. Those that were supporting you have turned their eyes on other incoming newbies and you have to fend for yourself. These are the hard times. You are probably busy and still squeezing time to put up articles and yet they remain as you left them after 7 days.
That was my article some 3 months ago and you can see what I am talking about highlighted
At a point in time probably every newbie felt like just calling it a quite because trying to balance Steem life and the life outside can be very difficult especially for students like myself.
Getting next to nothing for your articles makes it even harder and it feels like a waste of time. When this happens remember that people have made it here and the difference therefore lies with you. Your failure or success on this platform purely rests with you. No wonder it is called a prove-of-brain blockchain!
2. Develop and sustain your objectives and a sense of direction.
Why did you join Steemit?
For many of us, we probably joined because someone told us there was a platform you would make money publishing articles. You probably resisted for a while then he showed you testimonies and you jumped in.
Even if that was true with you, now that you are in, it is time you develop your own objectives for being here. It means you should develop your why?
This means you should redefine your reason for being here and then develop strategies as to how to achieve your objectives.
My scenario;
I came here because I wanted a way to make money online. Then after a while I realized that this platform had so much value in a form of free valuable information so I redefined my motives;
- I want to have access valuable information for free
- I want to touch people with my articles and I want to narrate the African story
- I want to connect with people for offline opportunities
- I want to learn about cryptocurrency as much as possible and
- I want to do all these while making money!
These new objectives gave me a sense of direction and I now knew what I needed to learn in other to achieve them.
I also now had a way of measuring my success or failure everyday depending on how much of my objective I had achieved.
This helped me when I was getting nothing on my posts. This was because if I didn't make money I still had a number of people who viewing my articles. Till now I still check my number of views and it trills me.
When someone leaves a genuine comment it often makes my day. This is because I feel I have achieved one objective. This way the lack of big upvotes on my articles cannot kill my spirit or make me revert into producing poor quality.
The objectives also gave me a sense of direction, helping me to know who to connect with and how to go about. All these are not possible when you only post your article and ran away. You ought to read the articles of others and interact with them.
3. Develop a winning strategy for your set objectives
Now that you have had your goals set, how do you go about achieving them by the day?
One thing you need to know now is that no matter how smart you are, to succeed you will need a coach. A coach is someone who has more experience than you in a given field and is ready to impart his experiences on you. Having a coach is almost a necessity to achieving success on this platform and anywhere no matter what your definition of success might be.
This does not mean that you should always be on your coach anytime you have difficulties. Try as much as possible to learn on your own and only contact your coach when you can't find a way. This is because your coach is also struggling with his or her own matters and too much request may turn him off since you are most likely going to access his services for free.
Read read and read, yes read! You should know that almost anything you want to know on Steemit about your development has already been published by someone, you only need to find it and read.
How do you find it?
You can search with the search bar on the platform or you can search on google about the topic you want. Let's assume I was interested in knowing "how to connect with people on Steemit"
I will type this in google search engine:
That is a snapshot of the result of this search in google
Now all you have to do is select the articles one after the other and read. This is how you can learn about almost anything on this platform.
So after you get what you need to do either from your coach or through articles,it is time to form your strategy using that information.
So lets assume the articles stressed on commenting on the articles of people I want to connect with.I will make a plan to write quality and genuine comments on 20 articles each day.
I also know that I can't make a quality comment without thoroughly reading and understanding the concept so I will chose articles that I can relate with and making comments becomes easy for me. This then becomes my winning strategy for that objective of connecting with people.
It also means that I can measure my success rate with this objective simply by counting the number of comments I make and I can adjust for best results.
4. Identify your strongest battle ground
source
Sometimes a strong, smart and tough general may have his men killed just by the choice of battle field. There are some of us who just want to follow the wind wherever it leads us and though some may get lucky, this is not the best way to play the game of life. You need to identify what you do best and do it best. Be consistent with it and soon people will identify with what you do and sync.
Sometimes you may be obliged to learn new things to augment what you already know but it should not mean you have to drop what you do, you just have to get better at doing it.
Okay, 
5. Don't utilize only the media, include the social
Make time for the social aspects of Steemit. You need to have telegram, whats-app and discord and if your phone can't hold all, I suggested you keep discord. It is almost a must if you want to be successful here. There are so many communities built around the Steemit to help newbies like you and me and they can only help if you seek them out by connecting with them and making contributions to their discussions. It is the only way they can notice you.
Some times we are tempted to just use tags of communities without first connecting with them and you can be sure not to get any upvote from them. Connect with people and chat with them and you will see the power of "whom you know" at play.
This is meant for the people who just joined the platform and still have no sense of direction or are not seeing results from their efforts.
Follow me for the next on this series which shall be on ways of making money on this platform.
I shall try to present to you some proven ways as well as how you can ensure your success on the objective of money making....
You can connect with me via this discord channel
Thanks for your attention, see you at the top!!!