Welcome to Steemit alexwonderful!
As someone who is fairly new myself, I had many questions about what Steem is and how to use the site. There are many tutorials explaining the basics of Steemit (the site) and Steem (the currency), however after a week of studying these tutorials, I was still left with some questions, so I began to experiment and ask others for answers. I figured that if I couldn’t readily find answers to my questions, then others just joining the community must surely be struggling with similar questions as mine. This prompted me to write and post what I had learned onto my blog page in an effort to save others the many hours I expended on research. You can find my article here: https://steemit.com/steemhelp/@happyme/what-most-tutorials-don-t-tell-you-about-steemit-com
And an addendum to the above article includes information I learned after making the above post:
https://steemit.com/steemhelp/@happyme/addendum-to-what-most-tutorials-don-t-tell-you-about-steemit-com
Another thing you should know is that writing articles is not the only way to earn Steem. You can upvote articles written by others and earn a portion of what they make on their article. The original post only earns an income until it is paid out, 7 days after it has been posted.
What this all means is that for you to earn a portion of the post you are upvoting, you need to make your upvote before the pay-out has been made. Look for the bent arrow icon immediately to the left of the REPLY button at the bottom of every post. If that resteem button is NOT visible, it means the posting is no longer active and you will not get any income from that post (it will only show that you appreciated the poster’s work, exactly like the ‘LIKE’ button on facebook).
A resteemed post is copied to the blog page of the person doing the (share) resteeming (similar to FaceBook’s ‘share’ button).
It doesn’t cost you any Steem to upvote someone’s work and in fact it WILL earn you some. This is why many people will gather a list of people they follow and upvote their work on a daily basis. These people will go to their FEED tab (it drops down in a menu when you click your personal icon found at the top right of the screen when you are logged in) and upvote everything their followers post. You can vote 10 times per day without depleting your voting power. In case you don’t already know, the FEED tab displays everything that the people you are FOLLOWING have posted. New posts that you have not yet read are highlighted in bold.
Lastly, you are invited to enter my weekly contest to win some Steem Based Dollars (SBD) at https://steemit.com/retention/@happyme/100-sbd-give-away-0001 .
I sincerely hope that this welcome message is valuable to you and encourage you to follow the links above for further information. I will be adding additional posts to my blog as I discover more about Steem and Steemit.com so if you wish to be notified about those new postings, I suggest following me.
Thanks for reading and I wish you success here on Steemit!