I am starting to get a few requests from people asking how they can be successful on Steemit. I will be really straight-forward with you and say that there is no easy path to victory here.

I was blogging for 2 years before I got noticed and it was a frustrating road. Sometimes I would work on articles for days only to have it read by almost no one and then it would result in a payout of $1 or something along those lines. I would repost the articles to other social media sites only to have my FB friends come and look at it and unless they were also Steemians, their "like" of the article was meaningless as far as financial progression was concerned.

There is one absolutely certain way to get the ball rolling in Steemit. That is, you invest some money in the platform. You power up your account using real fiat currency or other crypto that you might hold at the moment. Nothing is free in life and Steemit is not an exception to that rule.

While I understand for many people this isn't an option, there really isn't any other surefire way to increase the value of your account dramatically. Once you plug say $100 into your account, the account value will grow provided you produce quality content. I don't know for sure if this is frowned upon or not (please tell me if it is) but simply voting on your own posts will produce some value over time.

However, since I like you guys, and I have a solid group of people here that comment on my stuff daily, I am going to do what I can for you.

A contest of sorts!!

For the next week (since value can be added to posts for only 7 days) If any of you post a link to a blog post that you created I will visit it, and give 100% upvote if it meets the following criteria.

1. you don't plagiarize - I'm not interested in news aggregators or copy/pastes from other sites. If English is not your first language, just do your best. I am not here to judge your spelling and grammar.

2. it is more than just a photo. If you want to take a photo of something cool then also tell us about it. That is far more interesting than just your local coffee-shop's ability with the milk steamer with only a title. I live in the middle of nowhere and my coffeeshop draws amazing crap on my cappuccino as well. It isn't special.
   

   

At the end of 5 days I will choose 1 of those posts and then resteem it. As a further reward I will also 100% upvote that user's comments on my page for the next 7 days.

While this wont result in a tremendous amount of money, I reckon the overall value to the winner could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 or so. You'll have to help me know how much it actually ends up being because the payout algorithm is complicated a/f here.

This is really the best I can do, but I DO want to help everyone get a little bit ahead if possible.

Also, if this contest seems patronizing and / or dumb, let me know and I will delete the post. I am only trying to help.

IMPORTANT: Your post must be less than 7 days old or my 100% upvote will not contribute anything to your wallet, That is how the system works :)

Also, i will not be upvoting comments for a bit because i need to preserve all of my SP for the upvotes on your actual blog entry.

UPDATE Part 2: It is taking me longer than expected to get to everyone's posts. I promise I will get to them all eventually. Such a huge turnout!