Thank you for the good advice. Some of this I do, and some of it I either struggle with or didn't know. Your input here was very valuable.
I would have one point of serious disagreement with you though. When you refer to the trending posts as a way to figure out what works (as you did in your section on images), you are quite wrong. Posts in the trending tab are there by virtue of the account owner being on steemit for a year or more.
There areperiodically exceptions to that statement, but if at any point in time you look at that list you'll see mostly (95%) posts from people with solid, established audiences. By and large, they got to that point by virtue of being the cream of the crop... well over a year ago. A very large number of those people would seriously struggle to gain any traction on steemit today if they had to start over with no audience and were posting with the level of quality represented in their current posts.
In particular, looking through that list as it stands this very moment, I see a ton of images as headers for the posts that are perfect representations of what I have seen many people tell new users not to do, and many of them contradict the advice you've given here.
So while I concur that the posts in Trending are indeed doing well I would argue that it has nothing at all to do with the images used. Most of the exceptions are those who imported audiences from other platforms or prior blogs who learned the hard way how to use images.
- @serapium ... see, @markrmorrisjr, your article is already helping :) Never tagged myself in a comment before.
I still say, watch what they do, it's how you're going to get where they are.