This is your basic how-to post about how to actually succeed on the STEEM blockchain. We put it together to refer to at a later date and benefit the community altogether.

Starting Out Properly

Introduction

Make an introduction post that makes sense and is coherent and tag it with introduceyourself
Only use the introduceyourself tag once for the introduction post

Tagging

Look through the tags and tag posts only with relevant tags — people curate tags and upvote posts that are good and relevant
Use language tags like #kr for Korean if you’re writing in a different language

Pictures

Look through your family pictures or just go outside and take pictures of your neighborhood
Make a folder for your pictures on your computer or phone so you have somewhere to get pictures from without looking too far

Writing

Write posts about topics you know, not about topics you think people want to read about
The best posts are the ones you made up without referring to anything else — people who want to research a topic can Google it themselves
Write in whatever language you’re more comfortable writing in
Write about things like what you had for breakfast, your cat, or create a poem if you have no topic ideas

Formatting

Use markup # for headings
Make yourself an interesting signature that you can copy/paste at the end of all your posts
Copy/paste your post into a text file to make sure you have a copy of it in case something goes wrong when you try to post it
Take a free markdown course to figure out formatting https://steemskills.teachable.com

Citation

If you got information or an image elsewhere, link it to the original source — the more you cite the better
You can use small text markup <sup>text</sup> to make your citations look good

Promotion

Look for communities you can join like #teamcanada
Promote your post on proper chat channels (every chat has a post promotion room)
Remember that most voting bots take SBDs, which are currently valued higher than STEEM, and you may lose your money by using them

Tips

Monitoring

Use https://steemworld.org to monitor your payouts, votes, etc.
Monitor your activity on https://steemd.com every time you post in order to be sure the transaction went through

Upvote Bots

Use the bot tracker https://steembottracker.com to figure out the best price to pay for voting bots if you’re using them
Remember that you get split rewards from upvotes — if you pay 2 SBD (worth about $20 at current market prices) and receive a vote of $3, you actually got approximately 1.5 SBD and 1.5 SP (worth $15 and $3 respectively)

Internal Marketplace/Cashing Out

Remember that conversions take 3 days
If one of the tokens (STEEM or SBD) is doing well, that won’t necessarily be reflected in the internal market
Use an exchange like https://blocktrades.us/ to cash out your SBD or STEEM instead
When using transfers, look twice and then three times to make sure you typed the destination address properly

Beneficiaries

When you use a 3rd party service to post, it has the option of keeping a percentage of what your post earns
The example above is from chainbb.com which takes 15% and splits it between the ‘forum’ owner and itself as to help pay for its service
Dtube, Esteem, Utopian, Chainbb and some others take a percentage (each percentage is different) while Busy and Steemit do not
You can also use https://steemd.com to check the Beneficiaries on your posts

Promotion Chats

https://steemit.chat/channel/postpromotion
https://steemit.chat/channel/postpromotion-anything-goes
https://steemit.chat/channel/post-promotion-norules
https://discord.gg/TpesKun (look for proper room)
https://discord.gg/sUTrKum (look for proper room)

^{This is a cropped zoomed in photo I took. It’s original and took me one second to screenshot.}

Copy/Pasting and Plagiarism = Waste of Your Time

Posting random garbage from Wikipedia is a waste of everyone’s time. It’s a waste of time to copy/paste it and it’s a waste of time to read it. Why?

Why is it a waste of time to copy/paste?

Users follow you for content they can’t get anywhere else
Content that is only unique to you gets higher rewards
Content that is copy/pasted will be flagged by anyone who finds it
Wikipedia and other information sites have resource links on their pages for more information — if you try to replicate those it’ll take far longer than writing an original post would have
No one wants to read about “what is a sewing machine”, it’s just not interesting
If you use Google Translate, the translation makes no sense
You have to spend time finding the article to copy/paste, then finding an image for it, translating it, formatting the post, maybe rewrite some parts to hide that you stole it
People know the minnow accounts that vote for it are your own

Total time to copy/paste an article is about 20 minutes of work.

How are those 20 minutes broken down?

5 minutes to find a good article to copy/paste
5 minutes formatting it and translating it
5 minutes looking for images from other sources so no one can tell
5 minutes posting it and upvoting from your other tiny accounts

If instead you made your own article …

You would get followers who read your posts and vote for them
Your reputation would go up
Your payouts would increase
You may get curated by a curator program like @curie, which can amplify your rewards
You may go promote your post in places without being flagged
People may tip you for work well done
You don’t need to bother with English if it’s not your first language (posts in other languages are welcome)

Total time to write an original short post with your own pictures is about 15 minutes of work.

How are those 15 minutes broken down?

5 minutes selecting a photo or two you took at a previous time
5 minutes writing something short about how your day went or what you think about BTC prices
5 minutes promoting your post on #postpromotion chats

5 minute difference seems small …

At first it does but wait! What happens when your copy/paste posts get flagged or blacklisted? It’s simple: you lose that 20 minutes of work and instead have to go appeal your blacklisting (which can take hours of your time), track down the person who flagged you and ask them to remove, etc. That’s a lot of extra time you’re not generating any revenue.

Comment Farming = Waste of Your Time

Comment farming is replying to a post over and over, often with just a single word, and upvoting each comment. Some people try to do that to get extra rewards.

Why is it a waste of time to comment farm?

The more comments you have the more chances there are for you to get flagged
You only have 10 full power (100%) upvotes with the current system, afterwards you get diminishing results
You waste all of your voting power (VP) upvoting your comments and need extensive breaks for it to recover
You miss out on curation rewards by wasting all of your VP on comments no one will vote for
No one will upvote your posts or comments
When you comment farm and get flagged, the chances of those flags being removed by anyone are virtually nil

Instead, if you picked posts by established users and wrote thoughtful comments …

You would get upvotes from the blog owners for offering your perspective
You would get curation rewards for upvoting posts that generate a lot of money
Your reputation would go up
People would discover your blog and you would get followers
Those followers would upvote your own posts
Even if someone doesn’t like your comment and flags it, chances are you can get them to reconsider

Basics of Using Steem Social Media Platforms