Dear Fellow Minnows

Every day we see the birth of new minnows in the Steemit pond. Most of them come for the rewards, some come for the community, and the rest are those who got pressured into joining. (I know I did pressure a few.) :D

Basically, you joined as a lone wolf or joined via invitation of a pack.

Joining a pack has a lot of advantages.

You are taught how to navigate through the complexes of the pond.
You are guided on how to create posts that may attract followers.
Best of all, you already have a core group that will most likely vote all your posts.
...and a lot more.

This is one of the best scenarios for your startup and you can't ask for more.

However, there are also some disadvantages as the pup of the pack.

You might get complacent and start posting spam right off the bat.
Okay, there might only one disadvantage.

What happens if you start Steeming alone?
One of the most common mistakes new minnows make is rushing to make the first post then wait for rewards to come flooding. Okay, this might not really be a mistake but the idea of the entire post was a little bit off the mark. #introduceyourself has been under the watchful eye of curie curators and quite a few had a successful start thanks to this dedicated community.

Beyond curie and a good number of the Steemit community, there are those who stumble in pits of low-quality posts and sometimes even plagiarism, blinded by the scent of money. Then they realize how hard it is to climb out of that pit.

For new minnows out there, take time to write your posts. Have a particular audience in mind when you write it and make sure you come to Steemit with a clear plan on what to share with the community. Before I forget, making friends and connections with other people will greatly help you. Not only monetarily but your overall experience will be a positive one as well.

Once you're passed the start-up of your journey. You'll find yourself around a month into blogging. (Around where I am right now.)

Here, you are presented with a dilemma.
You've made friends, you joined various communities, you discovered posts you want to vote. But surprise, you only have 15 steem power and limited voting power. It sucks to have to manually queue up the post you want to upvote or worse, skip a few a few of them.

Here's a little food for thought: Our votes don't mean that much money wise, so it might be better to comment instead to show support. This way, we can begin to curate (narrow down) our choices to the posts we like the most. Steemit has this mechanism to encourage us to vote only for the very best. This might not be necessarily true for dolphins and whales but the point remains.

It might be frustrating but we learn to adjust to it and persevere till we reach the point where we can freely vote for our favorite authors. Yes, sometime in the future I will.

Photo credits to Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay