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.