The way you've covered the details there isn't really much to add, but there's one thing that has helped me grow a lot and thought i would share that.
Yes, while it's absolutely essential to have followers like you with great voting power, there kind of is an alternative. It's about finding your niche TAG.
There are a lot of dedicated teams on steemit who go through all the posts in a specific tag and they reward good content under those tags. Now, they don't necessarily follow you back but they're constantly checking out your posts when you're posting under that specific tag.
I'll give my own example. My niches right now are steemstem and smartcash.
I have gained considerable number of followers from these niches, i won't deny that. But for the case of steemstem, the huge upvotes i'm getting are from people who are not in fact following me, but they come across my posts under steemstem tag all the time and enjoy my posts. Why I bring this up is, not necessary that every time someone enjoys your posts they'll follow you back, even if they are constantly enjoying your posts. But they WILL reward you for you posts constantly. My science posts on average get $70-80 worth of upvotes, but not all those people are my followers, but I do get genuine interaction on those posts (can't avoid the occasional spammers though lol). The point I'mmaking is, even if your number of followers isn't as high, don't get discouraged as long as you're making good quality content, in the right niche!! It is absolutely necessary not to force yourself to write in a niche just because others are getting paid well. I'm a doctor so I enjoy writing about medical topics, but I also see people just trying to come up with science posts who are not even from the field of science in hope of getting upvotes, which often leads to copy/paste crap.
Not necessary to always find a niche where there's people with high VP. The smartcash niche for example doesn't really have such high VP and you'll see my posts not making anything worth mentioning in terms of payout. But I'm getting absolutely genuine interaction from people i actually constantly chat with over on discord and I'm absolutely enjoying it (which goes to your point of blogging because you enjoy it, not for the money).
So in the end, it's about finding the right balance between making some money plus having fun blogging!!
Cheers for this amazing post!! Gonna resteem this and hope some of my followers will learn some basics of blogging!!
That’s a great tip. Those who have a special interest or niche can hope to be rewarded by those who are interested in that niche.
Yes, one only needs to find those niches by hanging around...reading through lots and lots of posts and communicating with other users and someone might just introduce them to their perfect niche!!