Steemit Noobs - Steemit isn't About Posting Content, it's About Making Connections and Engaging with the Community

I notice here on Steemit there's a lot of discussion regarding whether Steemit is easier, or harder, to build a following and find success than other social media platforms.

In the past I've always been a believer in the idea that starting anything new from scratch is an uphill battle. Try starting a Youtube Channel and getting your first 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time to get monetized and you'll find out it's going to be a challenge.

Start a blog and see how long it takes you to start getting traffic, even if your creating amazing content. I think you'll be surprised by how many months your blogging for an audience of maybe 7 people per day.

I've always kind of echoed this belief that Steemit is no harder than any other platform to build an audience and have measurable success.

That said as time has gone on I've come to realize that Steemit really is a lot more challenging. The point of this post isn't really to hem and haw with problems or shortcommings of Steemit, obviously Steemit isn't the size of some of these other platforms, Steemit can tend to be more insular in terms of groups, and then there's always the whole money thing being involved which means people are going to have a tendency to vote for themselves and friends which is something all of us do to some extent or another.

One thing I've come to realize however is that Steemit is tougher than other social media platforms and that "good content" doens't always stand out.

Recently I've written two posts on Reddit which have done very well. One particular post got over 800 Reddit Karma, earned Reddit gold, and had comments into the thousands. That post on Steemit fell pretty flat getting a handful of votes and maybe a Dollar and some change.

Over the weekend I made what I thought was a pretty decent post, the post was titled "Why Cryptocurrency is Failing at Adoption - We're Giving Control Back to Banks, Corporations, and Government". The post was about crypto, it was a pretty long form type of content, and I thought I made some good points in it.

On Reddit it earned 300 Reddit Karma and had over 170 comments which is pretty good for the R/Cryptocurrency forum which has a lot of content your post can get lost in. Not as successful as my previous post I referenced above about Binance fees, but still a pretty good post. That same post here on Steemit got 29 upvotes and 6 comments, which actually isn't too bad, that's pretty good engagement, however money wise the post only earned $1.45.

I don't write this post to complain, more just to point out that new Steemians comming on this platform need to realize while you may see posts in the Hot or Trending categories earning money, that's not something you should expect anytime soon. I think it also highlights the necessity to engage with the community and make connections, because Steemit really isn't about posting content, it's about engaging with and being part of the community, that's where the attention is going to come from and in turn along with the attention and engagement that's where the money is going to come from.

Now I don't mean to come on here and lecture, I myself am a content creator so I get the urge to create and pump out content. It's something I enjoy doing. Something I personally need to work on more is becomming a more integral part of the community. That means upvoting others, engaging with people on their posts moreso than posting myself, being part of community projects and contests. That is where your going to find success on Steemit, not from posting content.

*** While I titled this post Steemit noobs, I think this applies to all of us. Even though I've been on Steemit probably about 9 months at this point, this concept explained in this post is still something I need to work on. I geared the post to noobs because I often see posts about how someone is creating amazing content but nobody is seeing it. I guess my advice looking back on my time on Steemit is until you've built a network of people, found some communities or niches, and made some friends, it's almost pointless creating your own content because it's not going to be see.