You may see that the images in this post are hosted by the website of a programming language. I own it, but its not on the market. I do not own the tools that I link to. Anyways now having declared that these images below are my own. let's proceed.
I am trying to make a list of some help that is more or less some observations that will help educate new users, taken from a full f2p method so to speak. If there are better ways or disagreements, people reading may feel free to comment. I may even improvise this article to reflect their comments at my own discretion.
Some of the first things you should be aware of is that your vote decays with each new vote but recharges over time, and has a certain value to it. I have included steemdollar even though it may not be updated to HF19 (which HF19 reportedly quadrupled the value of your votes), to demonstrate how weak your actual vote can be. You should only vote about 10 times a day
To see your particular value, just click the link and change firstamendment to whatever your username is.
http://www.steemdollar.com/dollar_per_vote.php?name=firstamendment
You could blog for hours on a single entry, and if you don't have the followers or people to market it for you (including being picked up by whale bots) within a week's time you'll probably be frustrated when all you see is a few steem pennies. Well consider all the time you may blog on facebook, yahoo answers, instagram, or other sites, and you don't see any rewards-that should be no big deal. Also if you go out and make more than 4 blogs a day, that can decay also. As 
So news sites may be extremely limited if they want to move here, and news aggregate bots-which say wants to mimic Matt drudge-may only want to post every 5-6 hours.
So what you want to do is create followers. Go out and search steem for content that you like or may be related to what you post. if if you see something is worth commenting on do so, and if you want follow that author. Other users may choose to follow you.
So if you are going to blog extensively about Donald Trump, you may want to try: https://steemit.com/trending/trump , similarly if you have another interest remove the word trump with the word of your choice. This will help find a collection of users with similar interest, the types of people you want to join you.
you can also try chat and market your post, once every 2 hours in post promotions, on the official steemit chat.
steemit.chat
Once in a while someone will say they upvoted you. I consider it good etiquette to upvote them in return unconditionally (ok, unless the content is morally revolting)-odds are they are actively marketing they will be upvoted further which can help you too. Yeah, f2p is seems like a complete waste of time-but the point is to grow so it isn't a waste of time. Once in a while a person may say they upvoted but didn't. Whether it is a system glitch (it happens), forget, or refused, you can check by looking for an incoming vote. But don't say anything about it if they didn't, and proceed like they did. Better not to make a scene or risk being flagged over a few steem pennies-and why I don't get too political here. Cough, Feminism is Cancer. Just remember their names, and if you see them again and they said they upvoted you again, just watch the logs. If they didn't upvote the second time, don't return an upvote this time but again don't make a scene.
Anyways steemdb is where you can check the logs. It can also show you when you are paid, when steemit itself doesn't yet have a flag that you been rewarded yet.
Again, you know the routine of clicking the link and changing the my username to yours.
https://steemdb.com/@firstamendment
Once in a while you'll meet people who will offer to trade votes and follows. It is not a bad idea for new users too exchange I think, as they are marketing their stuff too. Even if long term users don't like that idea they are a different type of users than minnows and it can be very disproportional against the long term users-whereas minnows will likely be growing together. But for minnows it really doesn't hurt; Like an advertiser on T.V. even if many of the customers you reach aren't interested in your product you still have the opportunity to reach out to those who do. But be weary of users that follows hundreds or even thousands of users; The odds that they will see your post is slim.
Unless a whalebot does pick you up, your best bet at growing initially is with comments. Don't beg for money, and don't be artificial. If someone post a recipe for an original apple pie or something that takes significant time to make, and 5 minutes later you comment how you loved that recipe and how it came out so well; well being artificial is the same as begging in my books. Similarly don't write a bot that comments "I like pancakes" on every whale posts. While I have yet to write a bot for steem, bots aren't that difficult to write. Really only comment on the post where you have something to add whether it be comical, doubt,new insight, new info, etc. If you comment only to say "yes, I agree with you" then you should be saying that with your upvote.
Anyways, instead of seeking out followers, now you are choosing people to target to follow. So even if you spend 3 years writing up a mathematical formula to that offers new insight to a clay foundation math problem ttp://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/millennium-prize-problems and only see steem pennies, a whale could probably mock the very core of steem and blog and say only, "ribbit", and make hundreds of steem dollars off of that post. If you comment on a whale post, you could see a few dollars if they up vote in return. Again don't be a begger, and don't be artificial, if you comment try to add something meaningful. Another thing to do, although it doesn't do much, if you see a whale post made say within 30 minutes (I try 15)-try to upvote-or if you see a whale restreem content, upvote asap.
It is important to identify active whales. Not simple whales who are sitting on steem as part of diversifying cyrtocurrency assets. Steemwhales seems to offer such a mechanism
https://steemwhales.com/
Now I have said a lot about upvoting. As steemdollar shows upvoting say your own comments don't do much. Before HF19 upvoting used to be used more for interaction (upvoting/rewarding comments or other upvotes), these days upvotes are more scarce. So you can use them to upvote causes that you like which rewards the content creator, even if it doesn't [always] provide you a return. As you can see below from steemstats the initial rewards for a new user are not all that great. maybe on average 1.5 steem pennies a day assuming 10 votes a day. As you get more SP, that number will go up significantly.
When you first visit steemstats, be sure to enter your username. On top of that, click the little checkbox to have it show only the post you upvoted.
https://steemstats.com/#!/
Thx for reading & Please Don't forget to upvote!
