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.
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.
I'll put together a clever graphic about curation next time, perhaps - but many people have done those. Thing is, then they tend to get overly technical and 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!
Found: Wikipedia Commons, with reuse license.
source and author: 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.
I just joined Steemit last night and found this post to be well-thought-out and super useful; thanks for all the information! I've been meaning to sit down and go through all of the FAQ but this was definitely a good start. Also, I like the idea of a calling card, yours is pretty cool :^)
Thank you for commenting. It always means a lot to me - especially when you're still at penny votes (when you are lucky!) As you can see, this is part 4, so I've got some more articles sitting on my blog right now. I do plan a couple more posts still - one on followers and some other tricks and tips I've learned.
You too, good luck and happy curating!
Thanks for the comment. I like your little avatar guy as well. He's fun and catchy. Great job!
I like your banner, can you say something about your business works? I am trying to keep up with how artists can make use of Steem
I'm bad at marketing, so I've often looked for different ways of exposing my photography in a way that people can simply choose to support or not. Although I have shops on CafePress, Zazzle and RedBubble, it's always been a slow trickle of sales. Here, even as I'm still pretty new to this game, I get more reward more quickly. I can even use it to direct traffic to the other sites. Although I've fallen behind on this task, I was including links to my image pages in some of the stores.
I plan to recycle my old pictures maybe once a year or when I run out of new ones - especially once my blog is a bit more well-known and I'm getting better rewards.
I also love that with Steemit, I don't have to stick with my "niche." I might do an article like I did today... some creative writing.... a meme challenge, etc. I'm not bound by having to have a single product line - as is often encouraged when hosting a traditional blog.
I'm trying to get my son to start one as he's a better photographer than I and could probably do quite well here.
I hope that helps.
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