I'm glad to meet an eager plankton, @jbgarrison72. This is not an easy place when new. Your best strategy is to learn how to work the angles here and get your account to grow as fast and as far as you can. There are many thing you can do to accomplish this and most are in this post:
I hope I will see you SPUDing tomorrow with @streetstyle. The littler you are, the more chance you have to win big :)