I Tried Alone To Make Money On Steemit. It Was A Failure
I have been reading, tipping and writing here in Publish0x for a few months now. So far it has been great. I am able to monetize one of my biggest hobbies/interests. Cryptocurrency.
I have even made it to #1 of one of the Publish0x competitions, with my very first article: 10 reasons to switch to brave.
Naturally, I thought early to branch out, and republish my content elsewhere. There are a lot of options, but I just focused on one. Steemit. My thinking was as follows: "If the content is good, it will surely get tips"
Well, I was (kind of) wrong
I Thought It Was Easy
One of my first problems with Steemit is that my expectation was that it would be easy. Like, Mario Bros in the 90s kind of easy, I was wrong. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things you better have or know before jumping onto Steemit, (if you want to get rewarded big time for your crypto articles).
- You have to know how the tipping system works. And no, it's not intuitive. In fact, since so many people had been manipulating and abusing the system, the system has set out to be counter-intuitive, so that a lot of scammers don't get rewarded. Last time I check they were on hard fork 22. Bitcoin hasn't been like that.
- You have to know the social etiquette to do networking... what? did you thought that your articles will be organically disseminated? not quite, specially if you are new.
- You have to know the groups to get you noticed. For instance, there is a semi-official chat of steemit, that lets you blast your URL, similar groups might exist elsewhere, even outside of steemit.
- You have to realize that every article (no matter how good) will only get juice for 7 days. Yep, every article has a rather short expiration date. Why?, I would say just three words. Bitconnect, Trevon James. (Google it)
- You have to court, please, and chase whales. You have to sweet talk to them, you have to make jokes around them. This is easily its biggest flaw. Steemit is a machine of human respect and a factory of socially divided yes-men. An aristocracy were people with money rule, no matter how idiotic they are. I personally dislike this and cannot really adapt well to this structural design. If your crypto content is bad, I will say it. Even if you are a whale. So, that leads me to my next point.
I Thought It Was Just Like Publish0x
Yep. I thought it was exactly like Publish0x,... long story short, it isn't, and that expectation made me act in a clumsy way. Wasting many good articles in the process.
I Thought It Was Meritocratic
Well, to an extent, it is not, there is a high class of whales who basically can pump any article they decide, and, since they can upvote themselves, even if they just post 3 sentences and a photo of food, they get 50 USD per post. Why is that possible? well, partly because the votes of a whale carry more weight, but also that if another person upvotes that whale post they get also part of the bounty. So people are incentivized to support/spoiled/reward that whale, no matter how idiotic, parasitic, lazy, abusive, manipulative, childish, immature of a whale it is.
Trevon James comes to mind (google it).
My Results So Far
Look at this: :U
My most viewed article, and my most practical and important piece of crypto-content IMO. That upvote? yep, that's me.
However, sometimes I had articles make some money.
However, here comes another mini-rant. That 7.11 USD??, yep, that's not the amount I get, half of the total goes to the upvoters, and half of that goes to steem power (that you cannot decide against unless if you use a third party) which leaves me with about 1.50 USD, which is not bad. But it is kind of misleading if you are a total newbie and are calculating the payment of your rent based on that number.
"If I do 3 articles per week who achieve 7 USD, I can make ends meet, yay!"
So, with all this, I have thought of a new plan. And if you get so far I guess you are interested, so here it goes:
New Steemit Plan
This is my idea:
Every new post (and the ones I haven't uploaded there yet) will be published to steemit, and a call to action will be placed on every future article, something like this:
"This post is also on Steemit on this link (URL) if you are on steemit and honestly liked this post, please consider upvoting this article there, remember that if this article takes of, you get curation rewards. Let's do this!"
I will try my best to reciprocate the votes I get, with only one condition. I have to like your content.
Finally, This Is Not A Whale VS Ants Situation
The main idea of this thingy is not to bash whales as a whole but bash the abusive whales. I assume there are sensible, rational whales who just want to promote good content. So, if you are one of those, I'm glad you are reading this.
So, what do you think? Are you ready to form a tiny-knitted group in favor of good crypto content and that wouldn't bend in favor of lazy and spoiled steem whales??
Let's do this! :D
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He...he my SP power has gone down. If you are writing good articles on crypto, blockchain, economy, artificial intellience, there is @project.hope you can take help of. @crypto.piotr, supports good content on these topics, they have a hive too - https://steempeak.com/trending/hive-175254
Post content there. They promote your article, you just have to make @ph-fund benificiency of 20% of your content amount I think. You check, but I am sure this will work.
On Steemit, yeah I struggled a lot, now my articles get some upvotes and some steem comes on the way. I use publishx too, crypto articles score most there but my last publication there got 0 votes, it's this one - https://www.publish0x.com/economy-and-finance/commercial-success-at-the-cost-of-destroying-a-river-tiruppu-xxepgq , but got some steem and upvotes in Steemit taking help of @project.hope
But Publishx is way easier to use, steem is complicated, anyway. My upvote may not matter much now, SP power greatly reduced, but if I like your content I would vote and give feedback for sure.
I upvote only good content(: ... anyway.
It's hard to make money for living for sure, but keep writing it would pay off some way, may take time, but it will I think so.
Thanks @mintymile :)
Thanks for the feedback and the options. I will make sure to check out those. :)
The brutal truth. You got to work for it. Network, or at least make the effort here, not just dump post and run. You follow virtually no one, you have posted less than a score of times and commented on others even less and yet you complain you arent making it. At least make an effort before you make all these claims.
Indeed, as @mintymile said, finding some communities to join and post content in will probably go a long way. Communities didn't use to exist, so I'd be very curious to see how much success you have with creating content and posting it in communities interested in that kind of content. I'll follow you and be interested in any updates from you on that end. Hopefully content creators will have a MUCH easier time being discovered now that we have communities.
Also, it is not true that upvoters get more rewards if they vote on a post that has a high payout. The reward system is actually designed to support content discovery. So if a person upvotes a post early on, before others, and then many others upvote that post and the payout gets higher, the person who upvoted early gets a higher percentage of the post payout designated to the upvoters. The earlier you upvote (discover new and valuable content), the higher reward you get.
Hello Boris. I didn't know that communities were that recent. It seems to be a great improvement. I will certainly try harder this time. Let's see what happens. Thanks for checking out my blog and subscribing. :)
Oh that was absolutely the case for the most part of steem existence. But is changing lately :) The first step is the hardest one, you need to build some followers base. With the recent implementation of communities this is a bit easier to do. Check out steemleo, gems or ocd communities for example. Best of luck!
PS. I see that you used steempeak community to redirect to this post. That's a good start! You can also use "repost" functionality to do this.
Thanks for the comment/feedback. Will try a second time a little harder. The first step is by leveraging my 350+ followers on Publish0x, let's see if I can finally break-in on steemit. Also, I will check out your content.
Also you can try out the steempeak's promotion system:
https://steempeak.com/me/tools/promotions
Thanks!! I will, Steempeak is so much nicer, since it has extra services that are really convenient, like scheduling posts. And the UI is so much better.
Yep :) New updates and constantly added, hopefully it will become #1 steem interface because it's doing so much better job than steemit.com
Here's an upvote!
Thank you!I reciprocate :)
Dear @cryptolohy7
Making money on steemit is surely very difficult and if your goal is to earn on this platform, then you will most likely always fail. Like pretty much everyone else who has similar approach and expectations.
Steem/steemit is a great place to build network of connections with like-minded users and earning some $$$ should be only considered a bonus.
Based on my experience - those who came here just to publish some content, hoping that it will be enough to be rewarded are usually failing and quitting. Hope you will stick around :)
ps. can you share link to your publish0x account? Perhaps you could also share link to your post "10 reasons to switch to brave." - I definetly would like to check it out.
Solid read. Upvoted already,
Yours, Piotr
Thanks piotr!
I will share my other articles here as well, perhaps one per day in order to not be to spammy.
I will try my best to stick around.
Hi @cryptolohy7
To tell you the truth - one post per day - I would consider it a lot. After all you're asking followers and readers to invest 10-15min of their time into "consuming" your content. And based on my experience - most people hardly will read your publications if they will notice that you're posting very often.
I would suggest that 2-3 posts weekly is more than enough. That's just my own impression.
Yours, Piotr
Got it, thanks!!
Okay, 2-3 post per week, seems okay to me.
It's me again @cryptolohy7
I would need to ask you for little favour. Recently I've decided to join small contest called "Community of the week" and I desribed our project.hope hive/community. Would you mind helping me out and RESTEEM this post - just to get some extra exposure? Your valuable comment would be also appreciated.
Link to my post: on steemit or on steempeak
Thanks :)
Yours, Piotr