I'm always inclined to believe things happen for a good reason, and its up to us to seize the opportunity when it presents itself. It was only two weeks ago when I discovered Hive account@jerrybanfield and his loud but entertaining youtube channel and learned about Steemit for the first time.

    If you are new to the platform the concept of Steem, Steempower and Steem Dollars might be confusing but I promise that if you open your head to the concept it will start to make sense very quickly.

     If you are standing on the sidelines simply because it just looks to good to be true you should know that in a way you are correct in your assertion. Its not so uncommon that some people on this platform sell the idea of steemit as something that everyone can make easy crazy money on but the truth is that to become a whale (someone that holds a lot of currency and influence) you have to put in a lot and I do mean a lot of work.

      However I did not wake up this morning with the idea of scaring people away from joining, quite the opposite actually. Its a good thing that you have to work hard to be someone in this community, this guarantees value and a healthy growth of the steemit economy.

If you don't understand exactly how the whole money aspect works, let me share with you a short video that cleared it up for me.

I would like also to invite you to comment on this post if you have questions regarding anything I'm talking about, the whole idea behind this community is to share knowledge and grow together and If I can help in any way I will be more than happy to do so.

Now if the concept sounds good to you, and you understand where the money comes from the next natural question how can you grow your account and become a whale?

This is exactly when we get to the fork in the road, many users on Steemit might not agree with my thoughts and observations and I'm completely OK with that. I'm also confident that as I grow within this community some of my ideas might change completely. But in no particular order these might be some good tips to get you started.

Comment, Comment, Comment

     Most of your time should be spent reading other people's blogs and commenting on them. This might seem annoying to some and its reasonable to see why... but the idea behind this is not for you to spam everyone with a generic post, but to build relationships with other users on this platform.

      I've found some great thinkers on here who's posts have made me reconsider some of my own ideas on relationships, finance and politics. So even If I was never make a penny out of this platform I've already receive a lot of value from it.

Don't simply copy content

     I've noticed lots of new users simply find old posts or youtube videos and copy pasting them into their blogs.

     What value does this user bring to the community? Are new ideas being shared, is there a reason for me or you to follow him? If you take a minute to look into these copy past accounts you would quickly notice that most of them are short lived and make little to no money.

Its time to practice patience

The negative reviews I've found about Steemit have a certain theme to them. Many of the ex users of Steemit complain that they posted for weeks and never got more than a few cents out of it. I've gone as far as to find a few of those users who left Steemit and they all had one thing in common. They never developed relationships and never focused on bringing value to the community. In other words they wanted to win the first place trophy but not run the marathon.

Steemit as a community and more so as a revolutionary idea for social media is a long term investment. There might be a few users on here who within weeks were making some serious money but they are the exception and not the rule, many of them are bringing over a large group of followers from other platforms and that is an advantage that many of us simply don't have.

To think that everyone is entitled to overnight success on steemit would be like someone buying lotto tickets at a gas station and yelling at the clerk because they've won nothing with their investment.

In conclusion....

Steemit is not a quick sprint, or a get rich quick "thing" you found online... It's a growing community that will pay you back if you are willing to add value to it, and that is the best thing about it.

Steem on my friends

MenO