Question: When you don't have anything to post - or have just posted, what can you do to increase the value of your account?
Answer: curate and comment on other people's posts!
First, we'll cover curation.
Curation is a strange dancing balance between being quick and not being greedy...
As we upvote Steemit posts, we not only give the author a tangible reward, but we also can give ourselves part of the reward for the post. Of course, being Steemit, it's nowhere close to as simple as that!
The first person to upvote gets the largest part of the reward. Each subsequent upvote gets a smaller amount of the reward until there's nothing more to give. BUT...
If your upvote is in the first 5 minutes of the post's life, ALL your curation reward goes to the author - NOT YOU! After 15 minutes, it's split equally between the author and the curator. After 30 minutes, it all goes to the curator.
Things that affect your reward:
Your voting weight and steem power.
When you upvote.
How many upvotes precede you.
(I'm beginning to wonder whether upvotes - even penny upvotes - after you upvote affects your curation reward - maybe someone can comment and enlighten me on that point.)
My personal strategy which is starting to help:
Using my "feed", the "hot" button (and sometimes the "trending" button), I look through the posts looking for something that already has high value but fewer than, say, 5 upvotes. I add my penny vote there in hopes of gaining a curation reward.
Second, you need to make comments
Comments can do several things for you.
When you make comments, you make contacts. These people might become followers if your content is good. (Remember, you don't need to ask for followers/upvotes - if they like your stuff, they will follow and upvote of their own volition.)
Also, if you make good comments, people can upvote those and you can earn further author rewards!
Another thing, is that commenting allows you to participate when you are out of voting power for the moment. And by encouraging others, you are making it more likely they will check out your own blog.
When I comment, I also leave a "calling card" in the way of a simple banner I made for myself. I also use this banner at the bottom of all my posts including this one. It's kind of like leaving a free sample and a business card all in one. It just lets people know that I'm serious and that I am into photography and the related artwork.
It really pays to get involved (as Steemit intends) and put real thought and energy into interacting with others.
Some people have posted the clever graphic on curation rewards, but usually, they get over-technical and tend to lose people like me who really just want the "gist" of the whole thing. Hopefully this gives you a bit of what I wanted to know when I first started.
Good luck and happy curating!
(Logo found on Wikipedia Commons with Reuse licence - ownership remains with Steemit.com)
Lori Aberle Hopkins – photographer at Viking Visual, author, student-of-the-world.
Follow, upvote and resteem me here and on Facebook
Check out my work at: RedBubble, ImageKind, and CafePress.
Camera has changed from time to time, the photographer has not. :-)
Unless otherwise stated, all photos are original to me and © 2008-2018.
