500 followers today & my tips on how to get 500 followers!

I have been pushing hard over the last few months to achieve my goal of 500 followers and a rep of 70. Not quite there yet with the rep but I will be in a week or so.

The 1st thing I wanted to say is huge THANK YOU to those of you who follow my work. I am most grateful for this and promise to always produce quality content and respond to your comments, upvoting those I see as particularly strong.

Or just because I am in a good mood :) Which to be fair, is most of the time!

Source

The 2nd thing I wanted to say is that many of my followers are inactive. Perhaps they are on holiday or they left Steemit after finding it too complicated? So while 500 may appear a glorious round number, my number of active followers is actually 340. Based on any activity in the last month.

How do I know this?

There is an awesome program (created by @mynameisbrian) called Dead Followers which calculates it for me.

What are my tips?

• Post every day. More than once a day if possible!

• Choose content which stimulates the mind, regularly making it relevant to Steemit & your own personal experiences.

• Start taking pictures. Landscape not portrait, to better fit the screen. Whilst it is okay to use other peoples' pictures, quoting the source, this platform is designed to reward original content. And that includes the pictures. It is a good idea to start using a program which permits you to add your own words & PNG files on top of your image.

• Strong thumbnail. Using this program, create Steemit branded images with a simple, clear description which sum up your post. Some people (like @sirwinchester) have created their own recognisable style with their main image. Which is a really great idea!

• Strong title & opening line. The thumbnail, title & first line are the three chances you have to tempt potential new fans into reading your posts. So always dedicate a little time to this aspect of your work.

• Use bold subheadings and bullet points to divide your article into chunks. This makes it much easier for people to skim and comment without having read the whole thing.

• Post promotion. I know it feels like you are done when you finish your post, but you are not. Post promote your work in all the right categories on steemit.chat and discord. Also use the Facebook groups. You don't have to do this every time but if you feel your post to be strong, it is a wise move to get it out there as much as possible. And now with the 7 day payout system you have a whole week to post promote your strongest work.

• Respond to your fans comments. I have noticed there are many who don't do this. Personally I consider it good practice to always respond when someone has taken the time to write something.

• Interact with other users by reading and commenting on their work. You can watch any of the feeds: new, hot, trending or promoted. They will all provide you with ample opportunity to interact with others.

• Put some time into constructing your comments. One of the wonderful things about steemit is the incentive to not only be kind to people but also to offer them support through your comments.

• Start initiatives. Having just finished judging this weeks Steemit Culinary Challenge, I can see clearly the power of such initiatives now. They can grow to be incredibly popular and really boost your chances of finding new followers due to all the resteeming that goes on in this situation.

• Use popular tags. You can create your own tags if you are posting regularly. I created a new tag with 'dailyquotes' and I also created a steemit.chat feed for this tag, and after having used this as my first tag on a daily basis for almost 5 months, I am getting decent rewards from it now. But if you are not going to use it regularly, better to stick to the main ones.

Okay, that's it for now. Hope this helped in some way and thanks again for all your support & upvotes :)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1281526168558106/