Since I made my breakthrough $18 Steemit post on Wednesday, guess how many of my adoring fans have written comments and private messages to me, begging me for advice on how they might duplicate my success.

None. But that's not because they weren't thinking it. I'm sure they were going to ask me, but got caught up in other things. Like clipping their toenails, or vacuuming the cat.

But fret not! With my superior powers of intuition, I have sensed all of your collective curiosity, and I am going to share with you today my personal, exclusive formula for writing an $18 Steemit post. Just think! Soon you, too, will be able to make almost $20 with a single article on Steemit. If you do this every day, you will soon be able to hire someone (an undocumented immigrant, perhaps) to vacuum your cat for you. Or you can pay them to write your posts for you, while you vacuum the cat. The possibilities are endless.

Getting down to business! After several minutes of careful analysis, I have determined the precise elements that made my post the colossal success that it was. Turns out, there are really only two essential components that every $18 Steemit post must have. To demonstrate, I've taken screenshots of my example post and marked them up for your edification.

1. Use Words.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but for many people, putting words in a row is the hardest part of creating fabulous content on Steemit. For one thing, you have to know of some words that you want to put down. Also paramount is knowing how to spell the words you'd like to use. And then, you need to organize them in some kind of order that will make people go "Hmm, I think I will upvote this collection of words." It's definitely not as easy as it sounds. For instance, you probably shouldn't just type the same word over and over. I'm not sure why, but it seems that people do not want to read a post composed of just one word, written two or three hundred times in succession. Even if it's a really good word, like "parallax".

If you're struggling to crack the $18 Steemit post, it might be because you haven't yet perfected your use of words. While a comprehensive lesson in word-use is beyond the scope of this post, I can offer a few tips.

First, you'll want to use words whose meanings are familiar to you. If you don't even know what you are saying in your post, how do you expect the reader to figure it out? Arrange your words in such a way that, together, they convey a cohesive idea to the reader. Make sure that each of your sentences contains at least one verb. Bonus points if you can incorporate some type of punctuation into your post!

2. Use Images.

"Okay, use images, every Steemit guru says that," you're probably saying. But what kind of images? Well, I'll tell you. In order to amass the number of upvotes you must get to catch the attention of a passing whale, your images should feature something that people like to look at.

People like to look at a lot of things, and different people like to look at different things, but there are three types of things that are universally appealing to the eye. I attribute most of my post's success to the fact that I used images of all three types. I have a hunch that doing this is what got me the bulk of my upvotes, even more than the fact that I used words. So here, in no particular order, are the three universally appealing image subjects:

MONEY

As you can see, my $18 post contained several images of money. Here's a good rule of thumb: The more money you can get into your image, the better. When I was writing my post, I needed to show my fans the vast amount of wealth I'd accumulated by posting on Steemit. The exact figure was 49 cents. Now, I could easily have rounded up to 50 cents and used two quarters in my photos. But I knew I needed to put MORE money into my pictures in order to get MORE upvotes. So the obvious choice was to show the amount in as many coins as possible. My post probably would have done even better if I'd used forty-nine pennies, but I couldn't fit that many in my hand at once.

BOOBS

Everyone loves boobs. Even if they claim not to love boobs, secretly, they do. Boobs are probably the most frequently looked at thing on the Internet, if not on the planet. So you're doing your post a disservice if you don't include some images of boobs in there somewhere.

"But Starr, what if I don't have boobs?" you might be asking.

That is a difficult situation, but not impossible to remedy. If you're a dude, or if, for any other reason, you don't have any boobs of your own, you can ask a boobed friend (nicely) if she would mind letting you use images of her boobs in your post. Promise to split the money with her when your post hits the big $18. Alternatively, you could draw some boobs on an image of yourself, or on an image of anything, really. And don't worry if your boob drawing is wonky or unrealistic. I find that when it comes to boobs, most people aren't too picky.

PIZZA

The thing about pizza is that it is delicious. When people see pizza, they are filled with an intense feeling of nourishment. Their subconscious minds will want to reward whoever provided them with that feeling of satisfaction. Just like when they pay the delivery driver with money for their real-world pizza, they will be compelled to pay you in upvotes for your virtual pizza. It's a scientific fact. So if you want lots of upvotes on your Steemit post, include pictures of pizza.

(NOTE: As you can see in my example photo above, in addition to pizza, the image also contains a can of Coke. This Coke is unrelated to the pizza, but I wanted to emphasize it to suggest a way to diversify your Steemit income. Once you've made your first $18 post, it is possible that companies might want to pay you in Steem or dollars to feature images of their products in your future posts. This is called product placement, and it can be an extremely lucrative side income. Although I have not yet signed a contract with the Coca-Cola company, I think I will be hearing from them soon.)

So that's it! If you want your post to skyrocket to $18, just make sure to incorporate both WORDS and IMAGES.

Try out this formula and watch the steem pour in! And be sure to keep me updated on your success. You know, if you're not too busy vacuuming the cat.