The Steemit.com blog platform is your voice, so put your money where your mouth is!

Hey Again Steemitizens!

Many of you know I spend a TON of time over in the MinnowSupportProject discord chat rooms.

What that means is, between picking on each other over who has the higher chat room rank and who has better steeme (steem meme) skillz, I usually end up fielding so many time consuming direct message inquiries from a half dozen people a day asking the same old questions over and over and over. Mostly, "where is the easy button?". And I always have to sadly burst their bubbles.

But I'm not mad, my fine friends...

We were all new once. No harm, no foul in that at all!

What DOES make me mad is that the answers to all their questions already exist in a million posts, easily found by one of the various steemit search engines either in the site or elsewhere on 3rd party sites like asksteem.com. But they don't take any time to learn how this place works. They are lazy, and looking for a handout, 90% of the time.

We do get "real" questions and our various volunteers like myself and others work hard to help them find out the answers. It is our pleasure, in fact, to do so, and many times we learn something and make a new friend for ourselves in the process.

But more often than not, these people just want us to give them an "easy button" to the "free money" and I hate to call a spade a spade, but those people will likely NEVER get any money, or any follows or any other benefit here. Because they are missing the most important aspect of this thing we call a "community" or a "social network".

IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU, IT'S ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE!

Sure, I do my fair share of self-promotion here, and that's totally required to be seen on the scene around here, for sure! But there is a huge difference between reporting your latest actions in the community, and begging for attention. A great example are the witnesses. We actually sort of demand that they report what they are up to, what contributions that they are making to the platform and the people who call this place home. It's not shameful when they do it, it's expected, in fact!

Get to the point already Cork!

Look, read the title of this blog. Put your money where your mouth is and let it sink in.

Do you get it?

What I'm trying to drive at is that if you want to "succeed" on this platform, there are some real simple, time tested truths you can apply to accelerate that process. But guess what? None of them are instant, none of them are all that "easy" and all of them require that you give, often more than you take.

Before we continue, let's take a moment to digress on what "success" on steemit really even means.

I got bad news for you.

I cannot tell you the answer for YOU. I can tell you the answer for ME, but that won't help.

I can suggest that you start by figuring out this fairly direct question first though, before you proceed to do much else around here. Maybe success for you, is as simple as finding a place to read interesting stuff. Okay, then if that's your goal, how much curating are you doing to help steer the direction of content here in general? How much DOWN-voting are you doing to get rid of the spammers, plagiarised content and useless posts that add no value to anything of any kind at all? Because that's how you'll end up having success as a "reader" here.

Or maybe your idea of success is to do this for a full time income or part time supplemental income. Well we all know that will only work with a quality following built by making strong relationships with other steemitizens who become your loyal fans of the future and likewise you of their work. You can't do this alone, and if you think asking for follows from strangers is a solid way to create a sub-community around your "voice" and that is all it takes and that this alone is going to work, you are already doomed.

Always be asking yourself:

• Have you created engaging content?

• Have you spent time welcoming and helping new members?

• Have you invested real time and energy into the platform and the community?

Or did you think because you wrote an epic post that everyone would just immediately fall in love with your writing?

So many people land on the MSP doorstep looking for that "easy button" where magical followers come from nowhere, without any cultivation or effort and suddenly you can quit your dayjob.

Bad news, gang. Nope, that's not gonna happen!

You have to invest in time, effort, energy, relevance, and a warm welcoming attitude. You have to go out and meet people, comment on their intro posts, get to know them a little and make bonds. It WILL reach a tipping point but not until you've primed the pump.

MSP's incredibly, rapidly successful founder, @aggroed once said:

"Comment as a minnow, Post as a dolphin, Curate as a Whale!"

And he's pretty much spot on with that advice.

Except the more detailed answer is to do all three of these things, adjusting the ratio as you advance through the stages.

It also leaves out what I'm writing about here in this post.

You have to give, to get.

It's about them, not about you!

Give, don't grab.

Am I making it clear enough with these simple cliches?

No?

Please, allow me to elaborate...

In business, the main rule of thumb to be successful is to find a need and fill It! and that's the surest way to entrepreneurial success. Here, the need may be curation, or quality informational posts, or entertainment value posts, or poetry or photos or artwork for people craving that sort of enjoyment.

It could be anything someone else subjectively finds of "value" and that's a broad stroke, with room for everyone to bring something to offer. So the sky's the limit - BUT - we pretty much ALL recognize lack of value, lack of effort and lack of quality when we see it right? So, don't do that! It won't help you or anyone else here get "success" from the platform.

So what examples can I give to support the premise that giving more than grabbing is the way to go to become successful here?

TONS OF THEM!

I mentioned @aggroed. This man found a need for help with the sorts of things that confuse our newest arrivals here on steemit. So he made a chat channel to discuss it and started posting what he was learning. As I understand the history, he took that on as a mission less than two months ago and was a fairly typical user then, struggling to be heard and seen just like the rest of us.

Now @aggroed has seen his simple initiative to give back some information to newbies, blossom into the largest steemit discord chat sub-community on the platform, with over 3000 member minnows supporting and helping each other every day. In the works is an interactive live streem "radio network" produced entirely by MSP volunteers. And @aggroed was just voted up to a top 50 steem block chain witness. He is seen as a mentor, hero and helper by thousands of people here now.

That's THOUSANDS of raving fans, like me. Did he do it for the money? NOPE!!! He did it because he's a giver. Who saw a need and filled it. Plain and simple. The rewards he is receiving now from that are because he put in the effort with no expectations of a return.

Others get less limelight but give just as much. All those folks delegating their hard earned or deposited real money into the curation and voting bots designed to promote minnows and help them earn something here.

All those smart folks creating supplemental software to make the platform more useful or easier to use, like @netuoso and @reggaemuffin and SO many others, that the list would fill 100 blog posts.

All those people who stand by in chat to help the clueless new arrivals learn the basics, the advanced topics, and the etiquette that is expected around here.

There are people making graphics for other people, peer reviewing and editing each others posts, creating curation trails and encouraging each other to keep going in the comments.

There are people creating fun games, challenges and contests, some spending tens of hours of their valuable personal time to create, execute and promote them. Usually, funding prizes from their own personal pockets.

Then their are the witnesses. People who spend and give a LOT of their personal time just to make this place even possible. The amount of effort they put in, is simply staggering and top witnesses might at most earn $1 an hour for operating their nodes. Trivial returns for the sheer volume of time they put in to making all this even possible for you. If you see a witness, thank them. Without them, we as a community, collectively die.

There are hundreds of ways to "give" here. And you will reap ONLY what you have sown.

REAL altruism will always win.

Begging for follows and resteems? Not so much.

All these kinds of people. The "givers" will be the ones others watch. They will be the ones like @aggroed, who rise to the occassion, find a need and fill it and in turn, rise to the top. All the takers will quit and complain, that the platform "didn't work" when it was in fact, THEM who did not do any work.

The successful people here realize that steemit provides only a platform, not a guarantee.

They know that it is a place for them to develop a "voice" and to exercise that potential provided by the platform to unlimited levels of whatever success in this kind of community looks like to them.

They put their "money"
(time, effort, love, cash, knowledge, wisdom, talent)

Where their "mouth" is!
(the platform for your voice IS your mouth, around here.)

Invest in this platform with your contribution (the "money" so to speak) and it will pay you dividends.

And I'm not just making this up. Examples are everywhere you look around here. The game master who spends 30+ real hours a week making a game fun for his players (I'm looking at you @fingersik and loving my role in Dungeons & Steem as a player!) Or the guy who builds a bot that curates only posts about art. Or the discord chat room mods in all the steemit related discord communities who relentlessly keep their respective channels clean from spam and jerks, and answer the same questions over and over all day. I'm sure you know the kind of people I'm talking about. You may be ONE of them yourselves!

But who am I to rant on like this?

yeah, what do YOU do to "give back to the community", @SirCork?

I've been here 33 days. I am NOTHING but a "minnow."

However, In that one month's time, I have:

• Cultivated over 700 HIGH QUALITY followers who comment, engage and chat with me now on a daily basis. We support each other here and they (YOU) give me reasons to keep coming back.

• made over 2600 posts, either all original, heartfelt blogs on topics people seem to be seeking, enjoying and responding too, but mostly those were comments. REAL comments, where I actually read the persons work and engaged in thoughtful commentary to their posts. This made me some very good friends, and eventually their support and resteems caused the balance to tip. I no longer have to spend hours each night introducing myself to new arrivals and offering to lend them a hand, but rather my content is beginning to pull people on it's own merit. Because aside from my just-for-fun steeme posts now and then, I am always trying to make sure each post I make GIVES more value to someone than it expects in return from anyone.

• I am working with some other great software developers in the community on no less than 3 upcoming steemit related tools and projects

• I built http://mspwaves for the upcoming Minnow Support Project MSP Waves Radio Network.

• I am not a rich man, but I delegated $500 (at the time, that was ALL of my Steem Power I even had!) to the MSP bots to help power them up to give votes to MSP minnows. I get nothing from that but the "feelz goodz" that come with helping the MSP group help each other.

• I delegated $100 more recently to the MinnowBooster bot as well. I am worthless as a minnow curator and my penny votes dont help anyone. However by delegating my SBD to all these bots, I am able to contribute to the people that turn to them for vote income and act in concert with other delegators to become a FORCE MULTIPLIER for good on the platform.

• I am launching a show on the MSP Waves network on July 31, called Monday Night Minnow School - which will be a live interactive show for minnows learning the ropes around here. We will cover how to make friends, how to format blogs, how to properly use and format your images and all that sort of thing. This is a volunteer effort that will take me 6 or more hours a week to manage for the weekly two hour live show. VOLUNTEER means I'm not getting paid to do that with my time. I'm paying forward what was already taught to me by others.

• I am an applicant for the Tech Column author position on @thedailysteemit newspaper as well, and I will find out soon if i will be a match for that open role. More time, more giving, sharing information and knowledge and wisdom learned along the way so that future minnows can turn to resources to help propel them in the pond that did not exist for those of us already here, when we got here.

• I spend hours a day answering questions, helping new MSP members register with our bots and find their way around, both in the chat and in the world of steem.

• I run contests and challenges and have awarded more in prizes than I have earned here. Because it's fun. And because those people keep coming back to my blog!

• All of these cost me time, effort, real money, and add stress to my already busy life, without a doubt.

BUT!!!!

It's a long tail game, people!

None of the things I see admirable people doing here are motivated by the money, in most of the cases I can point to. They simply enjoy helping, giving, and sharing.

They feel compelled to contribute in the ways that they each uniquely can and they do it for the love of the platform, it's ideals, it's future.

They play for the "long tail".

And the rewards flow their way as a result!

So, what can YOU do today to make it happen for yourself here?

Here's a Hint. If you skipped the whole blog above, here is the takeaway.

Do something for someone else and someday, that pay-it-forward attitude WILL pay you back.

Who do YOU know that you think is a community role model on steemit?

Let me know in the comments below.

Let's put a spotlight on the good and leave the bad where they already are, in the dark!

And just like that, this post is over.

Full steem ahead, steemitizens!

@sircork

Tune into my upcoming new live audience Q&A show:

Monday Night Minnow School

Only on The MSP Waves Radio Network - a production of the Minnow Support Network!

Get more info about this and other great steemit MSP talk-radio shows at: http://mspwaves.com

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The #MinnowSupportNetwork is a minnow's best new friend(s!)

Explore: #MinnowSupportNetwork and #MinnowSupport

Find us on Chat with the PAL/Minnow Support Project peeps at:
https://discord.gg/HYj4yvw

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Witnesses I support:

@aggroed, @teamsteem, @gtg, @timcliff, @klye, @clayop, @ausbitbank, @dragosroua, @rolandp, @jesta, @personzzz (@personz), @lok1, @someguy123, @thecryptodrive, @netuoso, @good-karma, @lukestokes.mhth, @klye, @theprophet0, @steemed and @followbtcnews (@crimsonclad)

Think you deserve to be on this list too?

Earn my vote. Tell me why!

Be sure to learn what witnesses are and vote here!

All Steemitzens should be choosing their preferred representatives to make reliable, positive, growth oriented steemit.com and steem network decisions for us!

Witnesses that I am trying to find time to investigate on recommendations from others:
@anyx, @pfunk, @riverhead, @curie