Billions of us earn $0 a day writing posts, sharing pictures, and uploading our videos online. On Steem, 400,000+ of us earn a total of $50,000+ every day for posting, commenting, and upvoting. What do you think of the simple message and call to action to join us on Steem in our seventh video ad together here? Track the budget and previous ads at https://airtable.com/shrXuoYTnODWA0QG1.

Facebook Ad

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YouTube Ad

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Ad Storyboards

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Initial Results on Facebook

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So far the results look to be the very best on any ad campaign so far! Usually the results improve after the first day as Facebook learns more about who responds well to the ad and on the first day this ad is already performing almost as good as Steem video ad #3 which has been the best so far.

For targeting I set worldwide on the interests below for round 1. As the ad gets more social proof and sharing, I will make new ad sets removing countries taking too much ad budget and also make ad sets targeted only to the USA, Canada, Australia, and United Kindgom to guarantee impressions in each. I will also expand into more interests if the results continue to improve for these.

Strategy

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While previous ads have been very long and all inclusive to completely pitch a small segment of early adopters, this ad is intended to have more mass appeal to promote discussion, sharing, and further research. The previous 10+ minute ads likely prevented 99% of people from wanting to even start the ad. I hope this format will make it obvious even to causal viewers in under 1 minute what the huge opportunity is in participating in our community.

The ad focuses completely on the money because that is what truly makes Steem 10 times better than using another website. The total amount of money available for creators is what is incredible here and this ad emphasizes that difference. I only signed up here because it is easy to see where the money is being made. By comparison, seeing how top Instagram users, Facebook pages, or WordPress blogs are earning money is not easy for the average user or to implement for the creator.

As I saw how much money the authors were making here, I was certain it would be worth my time to take Steem seriously. We want new users that will give up on what else is in progress such as an existing blog or an Instagram account and go all in here instead because each of us that is all in brings a lot of people in with us.

I link directly to my profile because this provides a consistent user experience and I control what users find on the landing page. In the comments on Facebook, I link directly to the account creation page but avoid it in the ad because most people will not be ready to immediately sign up after seeing a 52 second ad but instead want to browse themselves. Our sign up link in the upper right is plenty obvious along with at the bottom of posts for those ready to join.

For these ads, I am finally using the r=@jerrybanfield tracking parameters to help Steemit track the user signups the ads generate directly from the ads. For example, https://steemit.com/@jerrybanfield?r=@jerrybanfield. That said, direct tracking is likely to underestimate the true value by a huge amount because of cross device use, repeated visits, delayed signups, etc. Still, something is a big improvement over nothing.

If this ad does as good as I think it will, we are going to get a lot of new users from it and the video will end up with millions of views on YouTube and Facebook!

Funding

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The primary method for funding these ads are the rewards I receive as a witness as explained at https://steemit.com/steemads/@jerrybanfield/usd0-02-per-click-on-ads-for-wired-com-steemit-article and https://steemit.com/steemads/@jerrybanfield/giving-100-of-my-witness-rewards-to-advertising-steem.

With switching to using witness rewards for the ad budget, I am no longer using any author rewards for the ads meaning upvotes on this post will not contribute to the budget as they did on previous posts. Using witness rewards instead of author rewards eliminates downvoting, provides a consistent budget each day, and reduces the amount of my posts like this that get artificially boosted into the trending page from upvotes going towards ads.

Track the budget anytime at https://airtable.com/shrXuoYTnODWA0QG1.

Since my last post on October 17, 2017, I have averaged 55 blocks per day with the reward about 0.95 Steem Power per block near rank 27 which equals about 314 Steem worth of rewards including today. With no server costs to subtract today and Steem at $0.92 today, I am adding the following amounts to the budget for today from this witness update.

1. 50% of Steem reserved for delegation to authors here for writing amazing posts I can advertise and/or funding projects for delegation that reward authors on an ongoing basis which I can also advertise. I just delegated 5,000 Steem power to the first project at https://utopian.io/ and will be making the post plus the ads soon for it along with the entry on the spreadsheet. Today I am adding 157 Steem Power to the delegation pool from the witness rewards.
2. 50% of Steem power adds the USD amount to the Google and Facebook advertising budget on the spreadsheet at https://airtable.com/shrXuoYTnODWA0QG1 which equals $144 added today!

Would you please make a vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because this will help increase the budget up to 250+ Steem Power daily as a top 20 witness? Thank you to the 1700+ accounts voting for me as a witness, the ~700 MVESTS assigned from users trusting me to make all witness votes by setting me as proxy, and @followbtcnews for making these .gif images!

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Witness Updates

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Assisting with visibility for Steem is the primary contribution I make as a witness. The ads I make combined with the posts I make on my profile are intended to help bring in as many new users as possible and show the potential of participating every day here.

Here are my server specifications for my primary witness, seed, and backup server. These should be good enough indefinitely to run a top 20 witness position with a block every 63 seconds. So far 1 missed block out of thousands received!

64GB DDR4 RAM
2x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V3
2x 240GB SSDs
1Gbit/s connection

I tested my backup server for a block last week and it worked! I have conductor running which I hope will provide automatic failover to the backup witness if I miss 10 blocks. One good way to find out ...

For the rest of my witness information such as account creation fee, I follow the lead of the top 20 witnesses and strive to keep my server updated to the newest version as fast as possible. With a lot of existing responsibilities and limited experience in Ubuntu Linux outside of setting up each of my own servers and getting them operational, I collaborate with @someguy123 to help manage my server especially for updates, missed blocks, and staying online. He is on call for problems and had my server updated to 19.2 within hours of release.

Witness Votes

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With about 700 MV proxied and about 180 MV of my own, I am grateful and responsible for managing the witness voting for about 0.2% of all Steem power which is enough for a new witness to start getting a block every day and to sometimes adjust who is in the top 20 witnesses. My goal is to make votes that do the most good for witness especially on newer witnesses excited to begin producing blocks.

The biggest difference in the witness world is 0 to 1 block and I try to trigger that as much as possible. In maintaining my witness votes, I aim to build relationships where I can ask for and provide help which usually means in time mutual voting and collaboration. To make this possible, every week I remove votes from witnesses that are disabled or not voting me back and I seek new votes to help new witnesses start. Over time I expect the churn rate of my witness votes will be lower but for now it is about 3 to 5 a week. If you would like me to vote for you as a witness, please direct message me on steemit.chat or respond to this post.

Thank You for Reading!

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I appreciate you looking at my witness update and newest video ad for Steem here! If you would like to help these ads work their very best and earn a few new followers for yourself here, would you please reply to comments on Facebook and/or YouTube because those asking questions are often considering joining and your response can make the difference plus earn a new follower?

Love,
Jerry Banfield