@sircork Talks Steem Sense....
Part 2: @sircork's Steem Secrets to Success
@hopehuggs: What's the one thing that you wished you knew at the beginning of your steemit journey?
@sircork: Slow down and smell the roses. I think that the main thing you have to remember when you come to this community is you don't know where you are. You've just been dropped off in a foreign city, in one of those countries I'm visiting, and you don't speak the language.
There's probably a hundred buzz words related to steem, steemit and busy.org and changebb and zappl and all these things that you will be getting on alert. It's overwhelming. Steem and SBD, steem backed dollars, steem power, vote power, voting, witnesses, words that you've never heard used in this context before.
So, first off, slow your roll. Look around. Learn the lingo. Read the posts. Watch the videos. Figure out what's going on here, because money is at stake. So, it's not just Facebook and happy go lucky pictures of your kids' soccer game.
Pictures of your kid's soccer game here come with a story compelling enough to make people cry and they get paid for writing it. It's not as simple as that, but in general, because there's money involved, things are just a little different than they are in all the other social networks. Come in look around, figure out where you are.
Don't treat this like Facebook. That's the one thing you should know coming in. I came in and I was posting junk and people didn't like it. And they don't like it when you post garbage. They want quality content, that's what they call it. Its kind of subjective, but in general, it just means not posting a picture with no words and no explanation and a nothing.
At least tell us what the picture is up. You know. And because of that, you come in and with some Facebook tendencies, posting memes and things and they don't really work. Yea, its kind of frustrating. So, the trick is to look around and see what is working. Learn where you are and slow your roll, when you first get here. There's plenty of time ahead to get those epic posts out and make some serious money.
@hopehuggs: What three pieces of advice would you give a newbie steemian just starting out?
@sircork: Well, aside from figuring out where you are, there's this adage that we used to teach in one of the largest communities in the whole ecosystem that I was senior leadership in for a while.
And, in that community, we taught people to comment on other people's posts as a young user. To post lengthy, or not lengthy necessarily, but quality content and interesting posts, or good artwork, or great music, or whatever it is that you create, photography, whatever, knitting, whatever you might make and take pictures of and put on your blog, you should comment and build relationships first.
Once you've started to build some relationships to have a following and people you follow, you should begin to create content. Once you have kind of gotten to a point where you're mastering content, people are reading you, you're picking up followers organically from your content and the network of friends, of friends, friends who come to see your things on their friend's recommendation.
Then you become a much more powerful user and at that point, you should start to support the other users around you by liking and sharing, which we call upvoting and resteeming their work, by commenting on their work, by drawing attention to their work in your own posts.
Its acceptable and I did it this morning. To take someone else's post and write about it, and say, "I really enjoyed reading this other user's post. Here's a full link to it. Here's what I liked about it. I wanted to do more than leave a comment, I wanted to share this post with the rest of you and here's why in my own additional original thoughts"
So I wrote a post about another users post, which was well received by everyone because not everyone would have seen it otherwise. So, as a larger user, it's partially my responsibility to grow the younger users so that they will in turn grow more users. The platform will grow and spread, become more widely well known and it's good for everyone to grow everyone.
And one of the things I love most about steem and the environment is most people get it. So, the concept of help your neighbor instead of being snarky and insulting and trolling him, is beneficial to all of us to get more people to come.
And the more people that come and start to exchange this currency and these communications and these friendships and these bonds and these communities and all the wealth benefits that are here. It spreads, and that's our goal.
So, make friends. Make good content. Help the younger users. Do that in proportion to your size as your account grows in stature and reputation and financial status.
@hopehuggs: Are there any tools or apps that make your life on steemit easier?
@sircork: Thousands. One of the things about ... well maybe not thousands. Let me qualify that statement. So, one of the things about the block chain's nature is that anyone can make tools to attach to it, that talk to it.
So, the blockchain's a database follow all the information that is exchanged on this system, whether its financial transactions or post or comments. And all the things that happen get stored in this database and it's called the blockchain. It's a ledger of the finances and all the things that happen with the steem crypto world. So, the tools that people make, anyone can make.
I could make tools that enable you to do something or see a report about say your finances in another way or a chart no one else has made yet and attach it to the system and make it available, either for free or for subscription or whatever model like any website. So, as a result of it being open in that way, hundreds of people have already created great tools that give you, like I said, great analysis on your post.
What's the best time of day to post? There's a tool for that, that looks at user activity across the system. What's the best kind of picture to use or picture size do I make my header on my blog portfolio page? There's a tool for making headers.
There's a tool for almost every kind of thing you would do on any social network. For example, there's a site called d ... now it's escaping me ... It is dtube.video. And that like youtube only its connected to our blockchain, so here when people upvote your video or like your video, you can get paid.
@hopehuggs: Sorry. I think it's d.tube.
@sircork: Yeah, okay. So it's d.tube. I'm sorry for not getting that. You are right. Perhaps we can fix that in the message you had with this. But, the idea is that not so much that one website ... The point is there are hundreds of websites that emulate photo storage or video storage or audio storage like, you know, so you could attach it to your blog and post it and get paid for sharing this content.
You can get paid at these sites, you can use these sites just as you use the more familiar brand names. They're all connected to the same system. So, there are dozens of tools that actually rely on ... One that I like, to throw a shout out to, is steem.center, which is a wiki that users can use to find documentation about all of these buzz words and websites and tools and systems.
Because it's a lot to digest and they do a fine job or providing a publicly vetted system for making help facts and documents about all of this. So, steem.center wiki. Steem.center is the address.
@hopehuggs: Just making a quick note of that one....
@sircork: Yep. It's a good one. And they'll pay you to contribute there too. So if you, well they, again that's relative and hopefully, you explain how payment works somewhere else if you are ... When it comes done to it, there is money out there to be made in the steem ecosystem by contributing proof of brain.
And for you to understand that is much longer discussion, but just think of it as this: If you have a talent and you could put it on the internet, in a video or a picture, or words, which is about the only way to put something on the internet right, then you can, in fact, get recognition for that in the form of financial reward. And this is the place to do it.
@hopehuggs: You've already mentioned some of your Steemit related projects, do you want to say more about the goals and where you are with those?
@sircork: Well I can tell you that I'm most proud of the charity, of course. @YouAreHOPE Foundation is, I think, the worlds first fully 100% transparent blockchain exclusive humanitarian aid organization, that really crosses borders without nations, so to speak. In other words, it doesn't matter that my Agents of Hope, as we call them, are on the ground in the Philippines or Venezuela or Puerto Rico or Nigeria or Sri Lanka or Ghana.
There's so many countries we've done work in now, and we've done work by actually delivering food to people living on cardboard mats outside of hospitals. In Venezuela, in cities where just economically devastated, they're dying and they're laying on the sidewalk in front of the hospital waiting their turn for care three weeks from now, and they may not make it.
So, our guy there is 18 years old and his father and him will get up on a Saturday morning and make 300 arepas. Arepas are a tortilla, flour, cornmeal type of a ... it's a Latin food that's kind of like a handheld food that you can put cheese or meat inside the bread and sort of ... in America we call them hot pockets. In the U.K. you call them pastees or pasties.
@Hopehuggs: Pasties.
@Sircork: Pasties, I think they're called, and you see them in the shops and they're little meat pie or cheese pie. And so they make something like that in a Latin version and they go deliver it on something like a scooter or out of their pick up truck to the homeless people around the city or to the orphans at one particular orphanage that we've adopted in San Cristobal. We're working on the plumbing in the building, taking hygiene supplies to the kids, like toothbrushes and toothpaste.
We're doing things all over the world. School supplies, seats, food, shoes, clothing, for people that have nothing. I mean nothing in many cases not even parents. So, it's really heartbreaking to see these situations, but it's heartwarming to have found a community willing to band together, and it's going kind of viral, since I launched it in October.
On the network ... and everywhere now. "@YouAreHOPE", "@YouAreHOPE Foundation", "supporting the @YouAreHOPE Foundation", "we're fundraising for the "@YouAreHOPE Foundation." We're not millions and million deep yet but, 10 and 100 at a time, we're touching 10 and 100 lives at a time.
So, steem has facilitated that exclusively and it just happened to me, it was an accident, through a series of events that were sort of giving related and helping users, helping users that led me to sit there one day and realize what we had accomplished helping one user with like 10 steem, which at the time was the equivalent of about 20 U.S. dollars.
It's much more now. And when we realize what we could do with such small amounts of money to change the lives of others on this big ole wet dirty green muddy rock we live on together. It really smacked me in the forehead.
So yeah project wise I'm most proud of the charity. From a sheer hard work point of view, the steam star network and the station I was formally responsible for creating MSP Waves over at MSP PAL. When I built those two radio station, that was the 24 to 36 hours a day awake without sleeping trying to get the technology to work.
But now on Steem Star Network, we steam to YouTube, and Twitch, and we post on Dtube, and we post live on our blogs, or not live, but replays on our blogs of the live shows.
So you can actually see the shows live, participate in them, listen to them on replays on the 24/7 streaming stations. Catch them in our blogs. See them on the other watching connected video sites. And that's been a tremendous amount of work and then hiring, or not hiring, but finding volunteer show hosts to meet the 2 hour to 4 hour live shows each week and be there every week and show up
It's been real work. The charity's been a labor of love. The radio station, streaming station, video stations have been sheer labor.
Those are the two things that I do. And of course I mentioned being a witness, which is a project in and of itself, but that more of a solo endeavor and not as time consuming.
@hopehuggs: I was talking to another person earlier who said that in the U.K. we have £7.50 an hour for a minimum wage, but in Venezuela, that's a month's wages worth.
@sircork: So, Venezuela is just economically destroyed right now and there are some little eye opening statistics I'll take advantage of this venue to expose, because even though this discussion may be expired a year from now, in terms of the information in it with the growth of the internet, the changes to come, but Venezuela will still be in trouble a year from now because they're in real trouble now. Right now their economy is so crashed that there's no paper fiat currency available for anyone.
Crytocurrencies are saving the day right now on a number of fronts and steem is at a forefront of that with the @YouAreHOPE Foundation, in my opinion, because what we're doing is we're able to transfer the cryptocurrency through to the people on the ground there who are able to retrieve it and exchange it locally and it is a bit of a grey market when they get offline because now they're gonna buy paper cash from people who have hoarded paper cash in Venezuela before the banks stopped issuing it.
Today, every ATM machine in Venezuela is empty. Today, if you go to a bank, you will wait in 4 hour lines to get 15,000 of their basic units of money, I believe they're called, they're not pesos, they are, starts with a "b". Shoot. I can't think of the money in Venezuela right now. However, you can only get 15,000 of them out, and that sounds like a lot but, a loaf of bread is 20,000.
So you can wait in line for 4 hours at the bank to get some of your money out. And the only amount paper cash that they will ration to you is less than enough to buy a loaf of bread. So getting food is difficult, diapers and formulas for babies is even worse.
We're doing some work in Venezuela now through an agent in Columbia whose able to resource the diapers and baby formula and acetaminophen aspirin like, baby pain reliever for teething. He's able to get it in Columbia, he's going to drive it over the border into Venezuela to distribute it through family members of his wife.
So, that's the kind of network we have built. People really on the ground getting in their car, driving to deliver the medicine, so to speak. Well actually in this case acetaminophen is a medicine, minor one.
And we're gonna get those things to the people because people in steem donated through our foundation, which is steem based and 100% transparent. They can watch the money all the way through the trip to the photographs and video of the babies drinking the formula on the other end. So, I forgot what the question was, but I'd love to talk about that topic.
@HopeHuggs: Apart from what you've shared already, do you have any extra steem strategies?
@Sircork: So, just keep in mind a couple of things. Keep in mind that most people come into the system through a website called steemit.com. Steemit.com is just one of many, many options you have to interact with a steem blockchain database and community and the cryptocurrency.
You can go to other websites like zappl.com or chainbb.org, I think, or busy.org. These are other methods of posting and blogging and interacting ... zappl being like Twitter in that it's character limited for short posts. Then there's the video sites, the audio sites, and all the other places.
So, whatever your talent is, come jump and jump in. There's something here waiting for you that could lead to some reward. Definitely beneficial and great people. The next thing I think to remember when you get here is that success tip would be don't engage in the negative behavior because there are people here bigger than you account wise and there is damage they can do to your reputation on the system. So, in a way, treat everyone with a smile like you would on the street. You're gonna meet strangers.
You're pleasant to them. You hold the door for them at the grocery store, but you might not necessarily hand that stranger your wallet or the keys to your account until you got to know them. So, just be advised, when you get here.
Like I said earlier in the discussion, slow your roll. Figure out where you are and take thirty days to really start expressing your full self. Hangout. Just be quiet, because there's a lot to take in and a lot you could do wrong early on, but it's hard to undo in terms of building your following, your friends, your reputation, your personality.
The YouAreHOPE and Steem Star Network Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/xBVBYdY
SBD proceedings from this post are going to be donated to @YouAreHOPE
Here is part 1 in case you missed it: My Steem Super Stars: Interview with @sircork Part 1
Tomorrow, in part 3 you'll find out more about witnesses, if you are unsure what witnesses do, well @sircork describes it way better than I could.
Or you could just listen to the audio here to get ahead of the game: Audio interview with @sircork
How to vote for @sircork
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
My Steem Super Stars so far...
@booster916
@bitdollar
@olegw
@valorforfreedom
@nainaztengra
@sircork
Be sure to follow me on GINAbot, so you not miss a beat or pearl of wisdom, or interesting tale.
I also have a few more My Steem Super Stars interviews in the offing, they should not be missed.
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She will be pleased to meet your acquaintance and you'll wonder how you ever managed without her.
Free daily crypto: Swift Coins
My STEEM Success Strategy (not free):Post 2 Profit
Great concept. Glad I found you and following you. You picked up at least one steemvoter from the video you did from your Steemit coaching session.
Thank you. I try to provide good information and some entertainment along the way. Still play catch up with comments though, will get on top of that though.
glad to see the part 2 of this interview always something to learn along with these interview for me thanks for sharing it dear :)
It was an a rather epic and informative interview.
Great interview!
I love that your team is making positive effects in the world through steemit.
Mutual aid is an amazing facet of steemit which keeps the community tight, when we are closer, and work with each other here, we make amazing things happen.
I am sharing this post onto facebook, hoping that your words can help people migrate to steemit, I keep asking them to sign up, and posts like yours make it clear why this site is an amazing place to be.
@sircork has for sure added an amazing community aspect to steem, with the @YouAreHOPE foundations (and the radio networks too).
Thank you @hopehuggs for bringing this conversation to us. I want to appreciate the good work of @sircork for the great work he is doing in these third world countries. Am a bit new to Steemit, so I only get to hear about the #youarehope project last week when I was discussing my own charity project with a friend. Thanks @sircork for this.
Two points that I took particular interest from the interview is;
Creating Relationships on Steemit: Steemit is a community platform and therefore you cannot survive in a community if you decide to stay as a lone ranger.
There's something for everyone here: as a promoter of Steemit and the Steem blockchain on other social media through the utopian.io visibility campaign, this is a great message for everyone out there. I often get comments like 'am not a good writer, I can't write' etc. The response is that there's something for everyone. Just be unique and creative, and you will create a haven for yourself here.
Thanks again @hopehuggs for bringing this conversation to us. Am sure a lot of us have learned from today's interview.
There are a lot of entries points and yes I think that everyone's knowledge or creativity can be well represented here.
You got it!
Hi @hopehuggs. Another useful insight into how to approach Steemit as a newbie, seen from the perspective of a senior member. Very interesting.
Thanks
Dave
There are lots of ways to get to the steem dream, that is for sure.
Awesome post. I love to read this interview series.thank you for sharing.
More interviews coming soon.
Its a good continuation of part 1 interview. Thanks for it @hopehuggs.
My pleasure @lovecreativity
wonderful this was to read interesting interview :)
Thank you @cutiepie
continuing the interview i just checked this one great to see it once again thanks to you for sharing this enjoyed it :)
It was a very informative interview, even for me.
the superstars of the steemit they are working great here :)
Lots of super stars on steemit, I will find them all - a life time mission haha
Thank you @hopehuggs for this amazing interview. Hundreds of people join steemit on a daily basis and it is so important that they know what they are getting into. To make the most out of this. Steemit is a journey and every journey has its aspects happiness sadness experiences. We should enjoy this journey. Loved your article. i can learn a lot from your articles. Followed you.
That is right, it can be a fun journey as well.
Gotta learn many important things via the interview thank you both for taking the time and make us learn many new things that at least I was unaware of and that motivation really helped a lot !
It is a great way for me to keep learning too.
Great way to describe what's really happening in Venezuela. Very few dare to do it in such a manner, specially those organizations like UN or others that are just fronts (A fake facade), looking to the other way while people are literally suffering much more than in war.
Now a quick update: The situation has gotten worse. Now the people are paid in units about the worth of a dollar (minimal wage). Imagine getting through one month with just $1 in your pocket. And as time goes by, the amount will be less.
By the way, the loaf of bread is now almost 100.000 in the worthless Bolivar unit. And the pension the retires received are roughly 550.000. Make your own calculation!
It's a crime against humanity. People of all classes are facing this. Some of them are turning to steemit. And there are individuals who have jumped in and found a way out of this tragedy in it. But sadly, there are still millions stuck. Great Interview, @HopeHuggs . And Kudos for @Sircork for bringing this up, and being considerate for people in need.
I've been working with Venezuelans since last october, touching hundreds of lives down there. We are giving it all we've got as a team, with @YouAreHOPE.
That's good because there's a lot that needs to be taken care of. And this must be done by competent participants with the idea of real progress.
The citizens are a living like in a parallel universe. The quality of life just fell way behind. And culture downgraded. It's so alarming seeing people losing auto-respect and the notion that they are humans with the same rights as others. And it is imperative to create consciousness on that matter.
Hi @hopehuggs and @sircork
I have a question regarding to the advice.
Is it really fine if we linked our own post in other user's post comment section?
I wrote a good post that is interesting to anybody. But due to I am newbie, nobody noticed. And I don't dare to post my post's link in other user's comment section.
So if you reply that it is not a problem, I will start sharing posts' links in others' comment sections (of course, it shouldn't be a spam).
No, you SHOULD NOT do that, unless - UNLESS - the original post author invites you to do so. It doesn't matter if you are the worlds best author - an unrequested, unsolicited link is ALWAYS spam. Your lack of visibility is no excuse to use someone else labor and audience and post for self promotion. Its possibly in the top 5 rudest things to do here.
Go to the communities and make some friends. It's a "SOCIAL NETWORK" - you know what both of those words mean? They mean socialize and network. You cant be seen if you haven't bothered to go meet some other people. via thoughtful content contextual comments, or via steemit.chat or the 250+ steem related niche discord communities.
Thanks for the reply @sircork
I regularly read and comment on good posts. And though I have some followers my new posts don't get noticed and no votes or comments. It discourages sometimes.
Could you show me some good places to chat and share my posts? Whether it is Discord or other networks, suggest me some good communities to join.
Hi @r-k-m, you might like @thesteemengine is a good one for its community and , MSP Pal is a good starting point and the Crypto Empire (https://discord.gg/eBvDg7p) has lots of embassies recommending other good discord channels too.
Wow, Very great
Thank @hopehuggs