It's hard to watch sometimes, the people that come here thinking they're going to be rich in a month (OK it IS funny sometimes too).
Champagne flowing like a river to the beautiful people on their Mega-Yachts while their butler polishes up the Bugatti.
And all they have to do is puke all over their keyboards and hit POST.
Oh yeah, this shit is gonna be EASY!
You see them in the chat rooms, talking about "I'm gonna do this..." all the while not actually doing anything but hanging out in the chat rooms.
Actually what's hard to watch, a lot of the time, is the endless parade of drivel that comes through the "NEW" feed.
If you want this to work for you, approach it as though your votes and the time you're investing in it is your FUCKING BLOOD.
You can't slice open an artery and bleed very long before you go into shock, lose consciousness and die.
Your time and your votes are your Capital treat it like the precious commodity that it is.
In all my life, I have never seen a business like Steemit, and it CAN be a business, that has instructions all over the place.
You can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone's instructions, just like these, that tell you how other people have done it.
Study them and then find your niche here.
Don't waste your time chasing the "popular kids".
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You know, the ones who's selfie posts shoot up to $100 in the first 4 minutes.
It's not that they don't like you, they just don't care about you. They've already heard how cool and beautiful and how smart they are from thousands of people who got here before you. Your congratulations mean less than nothing to them because they've already got hundreds of people who are saying that about every post they make. They might occasionally respond and say, "Thanks" but they don't care about your 0.001 vote and they're not going to share any of their money with you.
Don't believe me, it's the blockchain, go through the comments and see how many people the poster has upvoted.
Then check their other posts and see if it's the same people who's comments get upvoted time after time after time.
Get over it.
Don't bother following them or their circle of friends who all upvote each other and don't waste your time or your votes on them.
If you're not an expert in some topic, find a topic that interests you and study it.
Sometimes you can get a hefty reward just for asking an intelligent question!
Sorry, Cryptocurrency is already being covered ad nauseam and unless you have some kind of super-extra-smokin-hot body, skip the bikini yoga posts too.
I would suggest, like so many successful people here have already suggested, that you start out simply commenting on posts.
Build relationships with people and gather some followers ORGANICALLY.
No, "I'll follow you & you follow me back".
Just having a lot of followers does not get you anything, your group of 100 engaged and interactive followers is far more valuable than 1000 people who have all agreed to do a follow4follow.
I can pretty much guarantee that you will be really, really disappointed when that first post you write (that is so incredibly fucking awesome because I spent like 6 hours on it) makes $4.62.
You're going to be really disappointed when you look down through the comments and see where someone made more money with one comment than you did for writing the entire post.
And you're going to ask WTF????
The F is engaged followers and you have to earn them.
My point in this post is that being successful here means applying the same discipline you would if you were opening up a FroYo Shop or launching a company that builds invisible flying cars.
Do your homework and approach it like a professional, the easy money was made last year, we've missed it.
If you just want to have fun, jump in and start posting.
If you want to build a long lasting cadre of friends who actually care about each other, like a community, you have to give something of yourself.
It doesn't have to be money; like I said your time, your votes, and your commitment to Steemit will be the investment that pays you the dividends.
I'm not showing this to brag, but this is my accomplishment after about a month here (I bought about $120 worth of SP a few weeks ago):
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