Hi stellar @Stellarr nice to meet you. I am a human and not a bot, the alien eyeball poking out of me belongs to @carlgnash. What field is your Masters study in?
I have to give an "opposing view" to a few of the suggestions made by senor @flashfiction below RE ways to get started on the right foot here.
First I wouldn't recommend using SteemFollower, which is the first link he provides ("GrowingFast"). First that is a referral link, meaning if you clicked through with that link and signed up for the service, he would get a benefit. Typically it is best practice to disclose that a link is a REF link, and it also makes you question why he is telling you about the service - is it because the service is actually good for you to use, or is it so he can gain a benefit? I will tell you from my experience the service is a terrible idea. It is very hard to search for posts on Steem. The best way for you to keep in contact with the posts being made by the friends you make here is to only follow real people who you care about. If you use the SteemFollower service you will end up following a ton of people you don't actually know, and moreso, a ton of them will be spammers/scammers. Your "feed", the place where you can see the posts of people you follow, will become choked with crap if you use SteemFollower. Keep your feed clean by only following genuine people who you have had a real human interaction with.
Second I do not recommend using any of the variations of pay-for -vote bots, several of which are referenced in the "Using Bots" link he provides. There are many reasons you should not pay for upvotes. First and most obviously - doesn't that very concept sound terrible? Why should you have to pay to receive an upvote when the entire system is built around upvotes being given freely? If the use of paid upvote bots becomes so common that a new user who comes on platform and does not want to pay to promote their own content finds their content buried behind a bunch of posts with paid upvotes... doesn't that seem like a bad look for the platform? I will tell you the way this whole dirty enterprise works. "Whales", who are the major investors in the platform holding hundreds of thousands of Steem Power, lease a portion of their Steem power to the upvote bot services. The upvote bot services make a small amount of profit, the upvotes given out may indeed give a small amount of profit to the users who pay for them (although less than you might think - remember that authors only get around 75%-85% of the total post payout, the rest going to curators who upvoted the post - so you have to factor that in when figuring if you made any money from a paid upvote), BUT the majority of the money gets filtered up to the pockets of the whales. Remember I said they lease the steem power? The majority of the profits generated by selling/purchasing upvotes end up in the pockets of the whales in the form of payments on the Steem power lease.
The short version of all that? Using paid upvote services increases the already staggering wealth inequality here on STEEM. More and more of the total Steem power is being concentrated in the pockets of a handful of the wealthiest investors. That is actually not a good thing for the long term health of this platform. Much better to take any money you earn here and either invest it in yourself in the form of Steem power purchase and power up, or even just take advantage of this as a gateway to the cryptocurrency world and take your earnings here to an exchange and turn them into Bitcoin and other cryptos as an investment.
Anyway - sorry to write a novel! But it really bugged me to see this user coming here and dropping this comment. I don't think these are good pieces of advice and I felt like you should hear another point of view.
Cheers - Carl "Totally Not A Bot" Gnash
Thank you so much 😀! Although very new to this platform, I daresay I was able to discern those who offered me honest advice and those who simply commented for their own gains, which is why I didn't reply to that comment.
You call it a novel, I say it's a very helpful and honest guide. Thanks again.