This is for people who get inspired by the "how to get successful posts" posts, not for those who write them. Writing them is completely fine. Some of those articles are even quite good. They show a deftness for analysis and make valid points, sometimes along with accurate commentary. I have no gripe with making them. All writing is good practice in style. What I want to address is:

writing according to an etiquette guide.

Don't follow all of it. If you do this with a style guide you feel like a cliche, and if you do it according to economic advice you'll come off like you're only thinking about money. Consider guides, but don't become them. This is a community system. I know it's an economic system as well, but it's not fun as an economic system. It's fun when people get real. The best posts are ones where people are sharing some sort of skill or knowledge, from learning a new hobby to practicing a mastered technique. It's exciting to see original content being made, and it's a cathartic success for all of us when someone enters the flow state of making art for the sake of making something beautiful.

So please take this place seriously, but not jadedly.

Life sucks and sometimes you don't get enough attention, but don't just assume that means the system is utterly futile. Try a little bit longer. Practice some more. Switch it up a little bit. Post things that you spend time on thinking about or crafting because you wanted to do it, not because you wanted to make the bucks. That's not a rule, but a plea. Get in Chats and talk to people, and go deeper than just linking your article. Don't be scared, make some friends here. That's kind of the point.

I don't come here for the trending articles.

I come here to watch what's been posted on tags and by users I respect usually for around two hours or so a day. It muddies the experience of that when a lot of it is attempted clickbait that didn't work. It just feels hollow, man. The reason it didn't work is because you don't have a big enough following. @shadowspub wrote a valid article a while ago about sweat equity, and how you have to put in the effort to network to make posts that get explosively popular. Basically, clickbait works because you can get it enough attention to snowball, then more people fall for it. If you're new, it's harder to set that in motion than if you have, let's say 50, active readers that dig your writing style and follow what you put out.

This is a video essay that I made with one of my friends, James. It's a bit stiff because earlier episodes were way too free-form and I wanted to see if I could memorize scripts. This one was about 1000 words I had to recite, 250 at a time, all in one day. So, I'm not presenting this video as a tutorial, but my attempt to make something to inspire my friends, and hopefully Steemians, to create stuff because they wanted to, not because they felt like they had to.

The reason why I took this topic serious enough to make a youtube video about it is because my friends and I have started an art collective. There's 8 of us and we go by the name lean4sale. Our website is lean4sale.com but we're going to have to update it soon. The video is on our youtube channel, which also has two music videos by my friend that are pretty dope. I'm trying to get some members of the collective to get their own Steemit accounts, so hopefully that works out.

All images were taken from http://imgur.com/a/pv929, an imgur gallery I made out of sculptures my friend submitted to display as /4$(lean4sale) art.