Dolphinschool students! Some extra tips for you, and other new Steemians.

I’ve been looking on the #dolphinschool tag and seeing you working on your assignments. I haven’t managed to get to all of you yet, but I’ve checked out some posts and seen some awesome work.

@markrmorrisjr has been giving you some great information, working really hard helping you along, and giving you some new ways to look at things. But there are lots of different perspectives on how to do things on Steemit, and I’d like to throw some slightly different ones into the mix. They might be things he hasn’t talked to you about yet, or they might be things where I have a different way of doing things.

Don’t post too often, or too little

Although there is nothing to stop you posting as much as you want to, people are not going to want to follow someone who posts too often, and clutters up their feed. An established Steemian might be able to get away with a little more, but when you’re starting out, once a day is usually enough. If you haven’t got time to post every day, try and post at least three times a week, so you don’t get forgotten.

Be careful with your resteeming

Mark is resteeming a lot at the moment, for the good of his students, so that is a special case. But in general, resteeming should be done sparingly. People are following you for YOUR content. Ask yourself questions like:

• Is this something I could have written this myself?
• Is this compatible with my content?
• Is this vital information that everybody needs to know?
• How many resteems have I got, compared to my own posts? (I used to hardly ever Resteem. I’ve loosened up a bit but even now, I don’t Resteem more than I’ve posted.)

Never comment without upvoting

Mark has said to only upvote if you think it’s worth it, though he has cautioned you that people won’t support you if you don’t support them. That’s true, you’re not obliged to upvote everything you read.

But I want to add to that, if you don’t upvote, don’t comment. Established Steemians are getting very annoyed with people commenting without upvoting, and this could earn you a flagging.

If you have little bandwidth, think even harder about whether your comment is going to add value to the poster. While everybody likes comments, meaningful one are best, so spend your bandwidth wisely. If you really want to comment and can't upvote as well, for whatever reason, let the poster know why and come back and support them another day.

One liners are bad for your image

I think Mark has already covered this, but it bears repeating. A post with just a title, or just one line, will make you look bad, especially if there is no picture. I’m also not a fan of just posting a gif, a video or a photo with no discussion. (EDIT: The exception to that might be if it's your own original art, photo or video, with the appropriate tag.)

Posts that are too long will prevent people reading them, but they need to be “meaty” enough that people feel like they’ve learnt something or been entertained.

I talked to one of you today about how a very short anecdote could be made into a fuller post, with some background to the story and an extra picture.

Powering up your SBD

At the moment, while SBD are selling for more than $US1, it’s worth your while doing 50/50 posts, then converting your SBD to SP. Do you all know how to turn SBD into SP, which will help you grow? If you need some help in doing that, let me know below.

I have some guidelines for very new people at the bottom of every post, that some of you might find interesting, so just scroll on down.

I hope at least one of these extra little tips will help you out.

Thanks for reading

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