Steemit for beginers

Hello there steemit friends!

So I am on this site foe a couple of days now and I can't really say that I am seeing amazing results, but that is perfectly normal as far as I am informed. The purpose of this post is not so much to be entertaining, but rather to keep myself informed and if possible to get some advice from you guys who have been here for long time and know much more than me. I am just going to explain how I see it is working and then I will be thankful if you leave a commend correcting me, or just a nice constructive message in general.

So it looks like there are three ways to be rewarded for your posts and those being:

1. 50%/ 50% between steem and steem power
2. 100% steem power
3. Decline any form of reward

I personally think that for a begginer it is best to choose the 100% powering up, because that will increase your "popularity" meaning that more people will see and potentially upvote your posts, plus in the beginning you are not going to be paid a lot of steem anyway, so it looks like first of all you need to get more popular. Although even if you choose the 50/50 way there is that option to use your steem for "powering up" which is transferring the steem to steem power.
There are also these steem dollars which I did not really understand - except that they are some kind of currency specifically for this site - correct me if I am wrong.

Then there are the followers as well. I personally now nothing about them, I can only guess that having more is a good thing :)
Also if it works similar to other platforms, you will probably see the posts of the people that you have followed, but again I don't know and I can't say - educate me please :)

How much does your post/commend worth?
I see that the upvoting button has something to do with that as well as the comments and the views - the more you have - the better. I guess you can say that the more value your post contains the bigger the reward is. Your reputation might matter. There is this promote thing as well, but I really don't know much about... it If there is more to it, please let me know.

There are a lot of things still yet to be learned and I am looking forward to discover them for myself. If you are new here like me, I know it can be a bit complicated, but I am sure with a little research it will all make sense. If you have been on the platform for a longer time you might find all these questions stupid, but if you can please leave a message. I will really appreciate it, thank you!