Are you one of those authors that continuously earns less than $0.03 a post? Well fear not, you are not alone.
You are not alone
Yesterday I was looking at Junes Post payout data and I found 342K posts with payouts of less than $0.03. I also found 13,635 accounts that posted regularly over the month and the average payout was less than $0.03.
Have you ever thought about not posting or posting less and curating and engaging instead?
Many people think they need to keep posting to be active on steemit. To be seen. But posting is only one aspect of the block. Reading, commenting, resteeming, upvoting, replying to replies are all other elements.
There are many authors that when you engage with them on their posts, will reward your comments with a $0.03 or more upvote. If your post payouts are normally around this mark then would it not make more sense to spend your time engaging with those that are upvoting comments? Is creating the post actually worth it when you could earn the same with a valuable comment?
There are some upcoming changes on the way, and these include changes to payouts on dust votes. From what I can gather, accumulation of dust votes to reach a value of $0.02 will no longer be possible. This might give you another reason to stop posting and start engaging instead.
Did you ever think you could improve your chances by posting less?
Well you can.
By spending more time reading and commenting and engaging, you are forming relationships, you are getting your name out there, you are marketing your steemit account. You are improving your chances.
Is it time to rethink your strategy?
Is it time for you to stop posting and start engaging?
@flyingdutchman has created a list of those that upvote comments greater than dust level. You can check it out here
Both posting and commenting are necessary to getting noticed here. Some of those people you commented on their blogs may visit your blog to see what you blog about. Some may even want to support your post, but when they get to your blog and not find any recent post, you may not get such support. Though it's very discouraging for someone to create a meaningful post and not get anything. You can't even tell if anyone even showed interest in the post. This is one of the reasons why the view counter should be brought back. Even if your post don't get payout, you can be able to tell if people showed interest in it by noting the number of views it generates. Most writers won't care too much about post's payout if they can be able to see their post's view count.
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"Some of those people you commented on their blogs may visit your blog to see what you blog about"
I do this, when someone leave a comment I often pop over and take a look at their blog. Maybe me saying Stop posting should be changed to reduce your posting :-)
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You're right. Someone that hasn't gain ground here can reduce posting and concentrate more on commenting. Most times i get more from commenting than from posting : even though i try to make my posts as informative as possible, they still don't earn much.
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if commenting pays and is in the long term interest of growing the platform and their accounts, I do think its worth considering, but some people are here to post and we have to respect that too
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Hey do you have data for those that also have not been commenting on others, of those 13k or so accounts?
(Oops it posted too early, wasn't sure if I wanted to leave it at that... How am I accidentally posting these things? Weird....)
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I could add a filter to the data and see, is it just a number you are looking for?
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No just curious to see how many of that group is comment interacting is all. Oh so I guess yes, a number.
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I will take a look later for you ;-)
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It is not me but your idea is really great. That's why I am posting only one post per day . In stead of posting I am doing like curating, commenting, replying and resteeming. This make my account stronger. I have learned a lot of things from you.
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ah thank you. I do hope what I share adds value to some. It was a though worth sharing, so I shared it. if people with low payout posts are looking at time value for money, then I would recommend heading over to the posts of those that do upvote comments and spend the time there.
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Yup. This is so true.. Engaging really helps. Not only with the reward that you can get when they upvote your post but you can also have a new friend but simply dropping comments :)
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you are right, great connections are made by simply dropping comments
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this is an excellent advice ... when I started in steemit, I despaired because each publication had very little ... and I started reading strategy publications and the one that helped me the most was the comments ... I was better commenting that publishing, so much so that sometimes I only commented during the week and I did not even publish ... now, I'm posting and commenting, it's really good to interact, there comes a time when you feel you have friends in steemit ... :) certain people who are my favorites and I feel them as my friends although I do not know them in real life ... but the fact of commenting is pleasant.
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steem is all about community and engagement. Get that right and the rest will follow. thanks for the comment @blessed-girl
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Hello @paulag! I have just opened you as a great author and steemit hard-worker after reading @steemitweekly as you were mentioned there. I've read couple of your recent posts and I like them, I read the comments here and I agree on most of your views and positions. So I wanted just to say that I decided to follow you to stay in touch with you. Hope you won't mind it)
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delighted for you to stay in touch, thank you for the follow. I must say, althoug I have my ideas on what I would like steem to be and how it should be used, the beauty of the blockchain is that we can all have different ideas and we can all be right at the same time.
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I suppose for me the platform just feels so huge that it's hard to kind of "find people" if you like. I haven't really made any acquaintances here yet. I did once trade a lot of comments with one fairly experimented user Dana Edwards but that's about it.
From my perspective the constant focus in posts on money and rewards and the lack of centres of congregation (for want of s better term) are the issues I see.
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are you engaging with any communities @fourth?
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With three, the SBI, makers and eco communities. That's pretty good but most of the real community stuff seems to happen on Discord.
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a lot of networking goes on within discord. It kinda saddens me because it takes so much time away from steemit. I hope the upcoming hivemind feature will be able to reduce the need for discord
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I'm not really that into it and it's weird to have to go to a separate service to network. Is Hivemind a chat system?
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Not a chat system but a communities feature
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Nowadays I´m doing 0.05 normally, but it still almost nothing. So I can relate pretty well with this situation, and I´m one example, specially last 2 months. I have been commenting more, replacing the time of writing a post with some more valuable comments and potentially getting upvoted and even attracting some followers.
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I spend the majority of my time on Steemit commenting. My commenting outnumbers my posting by 20:1, at the very minimum. I probably most even more than that. I find that many posts lead to wonderful conversations. I only wish we could design a good interface for longer comment threads. I don't have a good answer, but the current nested view gets hard to read after five or six messages, which discourages me to continue the "chat". And while long "chat"like post threads do not earn steem (people don't upvote comments as much, even when they respond to one), they can lead to wonderful learning opportunities!
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awesome. I like you style, 20:1 really rock. I never looked at my ratio. Maybe this is another pie @abh12345 could do on his weeklys because it would be interesting to see how this changes across groups.
Any idea your earning ratio for comments/posts
Thanks for sharing, this is inspirational.
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I have no idea what my earnings ratio is. To be honest, I never thought about it. I comment because I love interaction and going deeper on the post content. Since most people do not upvote comments, it never really occurred to me that it could be a part of the income stream. But then again, I earn so little on my posts right now, that I don't think about an income stream at all. :)
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"I don't think about an income stream at all"
I love this mindset too.
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While I'm not disagreeing with your perspective as a strategy , many people (including myself) came here to post.
....and many just don't see the platform in those terms.
Not a criticism in the slightest, just an observation..
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I do not take it as criticism, steemit is all about discussions and whats a discussion if everyone agrees. Thank you very much for your comment and valid view point
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It used to be me when I started but I found that as I increased my engagement by commenting I was able to gain followers and also quite a bit of rewards from those comments. In fact, I think I have earned more rewards from comments that my posts so far on the platform. However, as I have added to my Steem Power I have also increased my curation as well as I really want to motivate other users that potentially do not have the same resources to do what I have done. I also found that curating smaller accounts vs larger ones, did not impact my curation rewards so I am now a happy curator of these posts more often. I also recently ran into a bot called @trufflepig that searches fore undervalued content and have found he is right more often than not. I have been looking at his recommendations to help curate as well. The great thing about Steem is that there are many ways to approach it!
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there are so so many ways you can approach it. its really interesting to hear your experience on this and I think it would be awesome if @abh12345 as his weekly pie lists maybe considered looking at the payout ratio on account for comments v's posts.
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hmmmm :P
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well that's not getting an upvote anyways :-)
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this one?
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nope
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I would not even give that time to read it
Hows that for support. baby ;)
you follow me I stalk ou
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I'm definitely in that category; where often the comments I make wind up being noticed more than actual posts. Not posting very often it's not really a concern.
This does play into the user retention issues that I see discussed regularly. When people pour their soul into a well researched article and a week later they are sent the 3cents... meanwhile, in that week, they get to watch the trending feed where there's a constant stream of mediocre or worse content that was slapped together half-hearted and on the verge of getting rewards in hundreds or sometimes even thousands of dollars. People without a thick skin could easily lose motivation.
The frustrating part about curation is that you wind up having to start following people that you don't really like their content but KNOW that everytime they post that you can get 5-10 cents of curation. It's one of those mixed bags where the feeling is that you almost need to subscribe to stuff you don't like because it has rewards associated. Starts to feel like signing onto surveys to get coupon books...
Commenting is another gamble; many times comments just slip under the radar, many content creators do not address comments on their posts, but it has the benefit where I've had many comments in active threads wind up getting more votes than MOST of the actual posts I've made.
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you are right, many authors do not comment back and do not upvote comments. this annoys me. If someone has the deciency to spend their time engaging with you, the least you can do is offer a little time back. But these are personal standards I have and not everyone is the same.
You are also correct about having to start following people that you may not be really interested in. Maybe I should do a post addressed to the other side of this, those earning more that don't thank their followers.
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Maybe it's just the factor that I rarely get much more than one or two comments when I post, so responding is just a matter of paying attention.
The other hand of following people you may not be otherwise interested in is that occasionally, you will come across some other the few shining lights. People who built a following with little to no use of bots, who respond to many or most who want to engage in the discussion. People who, otherwise, would not have looked in their direction twice.
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Mmh, it is a 2 side cutting knife.
If one only writes posts but doesn't engage with other, their posts will not be seen and the value of these posts will be below the dust threshold.
If one only comments, they may earn more, but will never be able to write own post which surpasses the dust threshold. This because if it was a long time ago since you wrote a post, there is no reason to follow somebody back.
So, I do think that writing and post and genuine comments is the only good strategy!
But that's my humble opinion!
Cheers,
Peter
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okay so maybe I should not have said stop posting, but at least consider reducing the posts you do.
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Since I reduced my posts to once a day and got Partiko to easily engage with content on my mobile i've seen a real improvement. I'm meeting new accounts, im finding awesome content, getting new REAL followers and when I do post i'm getting comments and upvotes I wouldn't normally have gotten.
Also it seems to be improving my steem UA which means when I do post I get that upvote too :)
I think its a great idea, there are too many people just posting for the sake of posting and makes it hard to always find the best content which means they are lost and people dont get the attention and payouts they deserve. If we all were more active curators The platform would be so much better.
I've also begun to tag people who I think would enjoy certain content to try and help improve connections between people :)
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Sound like you have made some real good changes that have had a positive impact on your account, thats really awesome
"there are too many people just posting for the sake of posting and makes it hard to always find the best content which means they are lost and people dont get the attention and payouts they deserve. If we all were more active curators The platform would be so much better."
I could not agree more...perfect statement
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The trick is to engage. Always find and write a positive and valuable feedback. 😆
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Hello
Nice to meet you here.
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we love engagement......keep it up @legendchew
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This is a good point, and especially true when you realize a well thought out comment can add value, and takes way less time on average.
Yes, sometimes we see comments the size of posts, but that’s the exception. A good post is a project. A good comment takes way less time.
Point well taken.
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a good comment takes me less time anyway. I often spend 8-10 hours on a data post. there is a comment above from @enjar that is the size of a post and I am coming across this more and more often. I think its awesome to see.
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I can’t write a good post on my phone of any length. But I can read and comment on a post while at work or on a break.
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There is no way I could wrote a good post on my phone either, but yep me too, well able to leave comments and engage on the go using apps
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This was good advice. It reminded me to slow down and think of myself not as just an output machine, but as someone who is cultivating relationships.
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if you do not cultivate relationships then who will be your active followers. You need to be both an output and input machine lol
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You're right! Lately, I've been a bit too busy with personal projects, especially my #1 priority: my baby boy. However, I try to curate daily. I've decided to post only bi-weekly. It gives me enough time to write higher quality posts. We Steemians must take the time to read and network. In the end it pays off!
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aweeeeeeeee congratulations on your baby boy, of course that should be your number 1 priority, my kids are mine too :-)
the more networking we all do, the better the platform becomes, the better the platform hopefully gives rise to a better price of steem. Its in everyone's interest to curate more
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Small stake holders must comment more because it is their way of earning because of a more chance of comments being upvoted.
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well there is only more chance of comments being upvoted if you engage with those that support their followers with upvotes. Because there are just as many people that do not upvote comments on their posts
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Good idea. You can still post but comment more.
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Looking at the time value for money, is it worth posting when for the time spend you could earn more on comments? also with the implementation of SMTs bandwidth will become a limited resource, small SP holders might not have enough bandwidth to do both.......
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So far I have spend six months here and posted 245 blogs. I also made over 2800 comments. I never upvote my own post and I have invested $300 to buy Steem but what is the total value of my account? It is just $253. So, I can say that there is no use of working hard here. I have seen that some people get regular upvote from whales or some communities no matter how ordinary there posts are. I don't think strategies play a role here. Luck works more than anything on this platform.
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you are right, luck does play a part in it too. My account was worth over 20K in Jan, I have not powered down and its worth only 6K now with all the additional work I have done since then. but I have way more steem now. Its accumulation phase before the next positive wave.
Because I believe in this is a chance to accumulate, I have do disaagree on the hard work point. I have worked damn hard and I do think it is paying off. i work hard on posts, when I do a data post it could take the entire day, and then I try curate and comment and engage as much as possible. I know by doing this my 'engaged' following is growing.
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Hard work is OK but I have seen many hard-workers, getting just crumbs for their posts while things are much different for the powerful elites.
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You are so so right. Part of the problem is there are not enough 'middle class' distributing steem. We need way more large dolphins doing this work
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Good article, that was not at all clear to me until today and I have been annoyed already often that I for really good articles very often hardly got anything.
So you think I should comment a lot and vote ?
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that's a very good way to try. i sometimes think like you did paula. i see my post got better reward now, but still there is something missing. less cimmebyon my post because i reraly commenting on other. i should try this way.
thank you paula
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that's a very good way to try. i sometimes think like you did paula. i see my post got better reward now, but still there is something missing. less comment on my post because i reraly commenting on other. i should try this way.
thank you paula
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I know I have been lucky. I post only a couple of times a week, and try the entries to be consistent of my blog, of course there are occassional contests and fun entrires, but though I believe I should post more I find more convenient to work on longer posts and give them a chance to be seen. I do not use bidbots and I was told once I would fend in the land of zeroes if not, not preaching because I totally understand all those people, someone supertalented getting frustrated. Yes, the game at this moment is a bit rigged, but there is a lot we can do. I may be only a minnow but we small accounts can engage, we can curate (we do just small scale), can provide advice to confused newcomers of basic guidelines to make the most of it... teach them not to format, to tag for a chance of curation, to grow an honest feed of things they may like and support back... And to be patient. Ihave been growing slowly and organically and I am drawing my own conclusions of my personal choice. I cannot say this is the way I will see it in the future but itbis where I stand now. (Sorry if typos, written from phone) (Sorry if typos, written from phone)
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Hi there, posting and commenting is fine but I never understand how resteeming benefits us? and what are dust votes?
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Hi @paulag!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 6.683 which ranks you at #109 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has not changed in the last three days.
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 282 contributions, your post is ranked at #15.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
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Thats true. Commenting is an integral and important part. People just neglect its importance. Even I made post about its importance few week ago. It not only help you in marketing but also make you passive income.
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some catch on faster than others, thank god you are one of the fast ones :-)
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Hahah...not so fast...my first reward came from comment only when steem was high it got me 8$.....and made me understand the all importance
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