How Much Value Have You Brought to the Table? What’s Your Steem Effort?

One of the things encountered most often on Steem is that people say that they should be rewarded more for their time invested.

As if there’s many other platforms which do such.

Writing, blogging, and social media are mostly social capital to most and only a small subset of those practitioners actually manage to make a reasonable dime from their efforts. Usually those are also only those who put in hours and hours first getting to grip with the challenge and learning.

#flearn first mostly. Fail and learn.

As far as I’m aware there’s less “write whatever and earn” platforms online than I have fingers on one hand. Personal hosted blogs not included. For most the alternative to writing on Steem, is spending their time writing for likes, [not financial] upvotes, or claps. Many would never even manage to turn it into genuine profile social capital.

Yet, I’m not here to bash or to burst bubbles. At least not 100%. ;)

So before anything, let’s not forget these two important posts:

1. You are not entitled to an audience
2. Your content ain’t worth **** to me

And, of course, don’t forget that if it weren’t for this platform you were now most likely tapping photos on Instagram and having your data sold. Or trying to stand out on Medium and receiving some claps. If you were really lucky, your posts in popular Facebook Groups would receive hundreds of passive aggressive comments and even more debates.

Glad we got that out of the way.

Challenge Your Own Steem Effort

With the market rates being back to where they were around last September (these are golden times!), many have dropped out already and from my feed it seems that even more feel they are underrewarded.

Rather than trying to convince you that this platform is a rather unique opportunity and that your time would most likely not be rewarded if right now you were doing something different than contributing to the Steem blockchain... I have a little exercise for you:

Dare yourself to highlight your best content and write about it.

Imagine you were to build an own, not on Steem website, and that website is the one you want your future employer to see about you. Alternatively, imagine you were given the opportunity to pitch your best content to @curie (fictive scenario). Do you think @anomadsoul would upvote those articles? Would @blocktrades have upvoted them when they still actively curated?

Go through all your Steem writings and assess the posts. Forget about what they earned but instead assess them on content, creativity, and effort put in.

Show the World

Not one to merely ramble, I went ahead and did exactly that. Keeping in spirit with the ‘personal site’ element, I did not select any Steem related content or articles about tech news. For me those are low-hanging fruits but at the same time (for now) timely written content. While there are several of those posts I’m very happy with, no matter whether they were well rewarded, they all were ephemeral and may be totally irrelevant come September 26. Or in some years.

The content I chose was a very small number of articles posted to the Steem blockchain... probably my most eclectic content topics too. Personal attempts at creative writing mostly.

I selected only few posts, but that’s also because I tend to write more about Steem, tech, and privacy than personal writings. Yet, this is my “corpus”.

Being entirely objective, and with a background in publishing online, when I look at the Steem earnings those posts have generated I am baffled. Most went “flat” but one was curie’d and another post was resteemed by @ocd. On a personal blog, those posts would for most have made... noppes, nada, zilch.

Zero.

Yet, some Steemians would think I was unlucky. Unlucky because I was curie’d when Steem was $0.88 and SBD $1. No $400-$600 payouts for me.

I have earned more on Steem than those posts generated combined, yet I can say that when it comes to #mysteemeffort these are the evergreens which were massively overrewarded. That’s right... overrewarded.

Even when some made only $2.50 or $3.50 they still made more than they would have anywhere else.

Ask yourself now: “How does #mysteemeffort look?”