The answer is the same as for every other medium and every other form of publication.
- Just write.
- Don't write crap.
- Know your audience.
Point two is the part that keeps you from sock-puppeting your way to fame and fortune, because there's no way that any real person can compose more than four interesting and useful posts worthy of significant financial reward a day. Don't write crap. If you are laboring under the delusion that your Twitter-equivalents should be worth five dollars a day, reality called and it's using the red line.
Unfortunately, bid bots can be profitable – but they effectively act as complex betting pools where at a certain point you're bidding against yourself. While they may present an interesting minigame in and of themselves for some players on the blockchain, they are in no wise and no way useful for promotion or the like.
Nobody looks at Hot or Trending. Nobody.
I've written pretty extensively before about the problem with Steemit as a social network and in particular its issue with discoverability. Communities are an absolutely essential part of successful social media networks which were pretty well figured out 10 years ago and which Steemit utterly neglected to implement in any way, shape, or form. It's not just an oversight, its active neglect.
Along that line, the suggested mechanism for community management in the upcoming hardfork 20 is going to be completely useless. Well, not completely useless, but it lives next door to useless and they trade cups of sugar on a regular basis.
What we need is an easy way to manage and filter content so that instead of sipping from a fire hose every time we go looking for stuff we like, we can actually find the things we're interested in. I maintain that such a thing would be best implemented as some sort of web of trust system, but almost anything – even back to layering on the old-school USENET newsgroup architecture – would be infinitely preferable to the current situation.
For myself, I've taken to using GinaBot fairly extensively. I can literally monitor every mention of role-playing games and 3D printing that occurs on the blockchain, new posts and comments. That I can do so without unduly straining myself or even working particularly hard is an ugly commentary on how small a portion actual content posts to the steem blockchain really are.
Along those lines, I have been active in commenting on the posts of people who write about things I'm interested in. I'm careful about who I follow so that I don't spam myself with a lot of garbage. I'm even more careful about who I re-steem, restraining myself and keeping myself to a small set of topics so that I know that other people who are interested in the things I am know they can follow me and only get those things.
That goes to point three: know your audience.
What we definitely don't need? Advertising mechanisms. Nobody wants advertise content. There's a reason that ad blockers are some of the most aggressively installed, common add-ons for web browsers.
Advertising doesn't work.
Nobody wants random crap they didn't choose to read pushed in their face. They just don't. Let's stop pretending that they do just because that was the assumption back in the day and look at how people actually consume content on the Internet (and in their daily lives) to see what would actually be useful to them.
What they want is discovery.
Nobody reads a book and wants to find a reminder that they could be reading an entirely different book right now. That's stupid. And yet, that's what advertising is. What they want is to get to the end of a book and see a couple of pages which go, "if you liked this book, here are some other books that you might like!"
Yes, that sucks if you are a new creator and no one knows what you're up to yet. You may not know what you're up to yet. You don't need advertising. You need to pretend that other people are, in fact, human beings with needs and wants, and you need to find the people who need and want the things that you make.
We don't need advertising. We just need communities that work, because communities are self organizing, self architecting, self managing ways for individuals to find content that they want.
And lastly, I don't need a browser to start popping up even more useless, ephemeral, transitory blocks on my desktop. It would be nice if Steemit actually had a tab which told you when you were mentioned and which would do what Ginabot does on a static basis, but I'm not holding my breath.
Frankly, Steemit needs a massive number of changes to be an effective social media platform. Both fortunately and unfortunately, Steemit could be replaced entire by a different front end that wanted to do the work. I say "unfortunately," because sometimes it feels as though the implementers of the blockchain decided to implement a deliberately half-assed social networking solution with the full intention of profiting off someone else's work when they got tired of dealing with the garbage, implemented their own, and it became popular. After all, that would drive value into the steem blockchain – which would elevate the vastly substantial amount of holding that they keep in their corporate accounts.
Though I might just be a cynic.
I used to write for a dozen popular blogs and can write a thousand and more words per hour, plus my wife is an editor, but granted that is the exception rather than the norm ;)
I used to hang out with Steve Long, who was a writer for several role-playing game lines at the same time and could take an entire publication from draft to sending it off in the time that I can finish breakfast.
Now, to be fair, I generally have breakfast around noon, but the man was ridiculously prolific.
Still, even he acknowledged that he only really produced a couple of solid pieces of work a day. And every day won't be that successful.
Human attention is finite, but beyond that, you need to have other things that you're doing in your life other than writing – because good writers have other things that inform their writing.
If you're posting eight things a day to Steemit, on a good day one of them will be decent. If you're posting four things a day to Steemit, on a good day one of them will be decent. If you're posting one thing to Steemit that takes you a couple of days on and off of tinkering before it's ready to go out? Every time you post, it will be decent.
Guess which of the above behaviors will get you more followers? Guess which of the above behaviors will get you more people who want to read everything you produce? It's the one that leads to consistency. It's the one where an audience finds you and enjoys everything that you do.
It's a terrible world.
In my experiece the articles I have written that have gained most traction have not necessarily been the writing that I bled over, in many cases in fact it was content that I rage-punched into the keyboard with only minimal brain oversight ;)
It seems like you probably should have learned what your audience wanted.
Now imagine how much better it would have been if you could have carefully crafted content which appeared to be rage punched in the keyboard!
😂 maybe!
My day job is marketing technology so knowing my audience is what keeps the lights on - knowing what will go viral, though ... more art than science :)
I also market technology for a living and continuously do research to understand what goes through the heads of my buyers as they investigate and evaluate solutions like mine. Knowing what will go viral is a hope, not an art.
Because it can’t be planned, I don’t even think about what might go viral, I think about what might be really useful to my audience and the challenge they are trying to solve.
The unfortunate thing is that the monetary reward system in Steemit does not reward you for knowing and serving your audience, because there is no way to identify, reach, or engage your audience.
Upvotes from whales is akin to Googles algorithms that reward inbound links from highly ranked sites. Imagine if instead of upvotes from whales being what matters, it was some expression of how useful your content was to your target audience. What if I had a limit of 10 upvotes a day or 100 a week, and I could use them any way I want, and give all 10 to one article because it was super helpful to me?
I think that the current barriers to getting your content seen will prevent Steemit from ever being a social network for marketers to engage their audience with highly useful content and ideas.