As a minnow, is it better to help around or concentrate on your own success?
I am a minnow and I would love to hear some answers from people that are longer on Steemit.
Let's be clear, my goal is to help real people and support them. But one question keeps running around my head for a while.
Should I concentrate on myself to be bigger as fast as possible or should I continue to support others? That means, giving away SBD/STEEM, don't care about curation rewards, giving my vote to curation trails,...
As a minnow who is now close to 1000SP without investing real money on Steem, I highly suggest doing BOTH.
What I did was join some Communities that support content creators like Qurator, Jumbot, Make-a-Whale, SilverGoldBotty, SteemPh.Cebu all the while somewhat supporting them back by delegating some of my Steem Power to them.
The moment I reached 200SP, I delegated half of that to Qurator and at that point was receiving daily guaranteed upvotes from them to support my blog posts which used to be earning only less than $0.2. I then use the other half to give a full upvote to people who keep on engaging with my contents. It might only give them less than $0.01 at that time, but believe it or not it's the thought that matters. We all start small and giving an upvote at 100% sends in a signal to that author that we appreciate their work and if we could only give more, we would. You just cannot support others without supporting yourself first.
As for the curation trails, I strongly discourage you to follow one at this point. From personal experience, no one really bothers to look the account of those trailers. It would be much better to just give a full vote to someone you deemed worthy even if it's just a measly $0.01.
Why not both?! One helps the other :)
Good question. I was in the same situation before, until I decided to invest real money and power up some sp. But even now, I still focus on growing my own account by creating quality posts on a daily basis. But that doesn't mean I am not helping. I support many authors (most of them friends) by putting them on steemauto autovote. I run weekly games and give away SBD, just for the fun of it.
For a minnow, I know it is really difficult to grow (gain steem power). And your little sp stakes are, to be honest, worth too little to have any impact (upvote value) to anyone that you support. But providing support is not just about giving a $ value. By upvoting a good post, you acknowledge that it is a quality post. It is also important to leave a comment. To engage with the author and soon, your effort will pay off.
I don't suggest joining a curation trail. Firstly, your upvote has little $ value. Second, there is no engagement done. The author doesn't know who you are, although you upvoted him or her. Instead, I suggest to do manual curation, AND, leave a comment for every upvoted post.
Another suggestion is to build up your reputation. So yeah, focus on your own development first. And help others by joining communities that help people.
At first I had my votes on couple of curation trails because I trusted these communities but now I am thinking about starting curating manually more.
I also have my WHACK Curation SHOW where I give away sbd/steem and I also support around by gifting, but I wanted to raise this question to have a broader perspective.
I think a minnow should first of all focus on his or her own success on steemit by creating quality contents and
finding creative ways to promote the contents and
make it get more visibility because the higher the visibility the more upvotes the user can get and the
upvotes is what translates to money making on the platform...
I hope you think money making = powering up :)
I am just trying to find out the fastest way to be big so that I can support others...
It's just like they tell you in the airplane safety speech. You should make sure you are secure before helping others. If you want to help fellow minnows then hold a contest or two so that you can promote yourself while also giving away sbd/steem.
I always believe in growing myself first before I focus on helping others. My reason is simple, if you are powerless (pun intended, haha..) yourself, how can you expect to provide meaningful support for the others?
Fortunately, on the Steem platform, helping yourself and helping others are not mutually exclusive. By upvoting others, you also get curation rewards. By sponsoring someone a SBI share, you too get a share. By delegating to a community bot, you usually get upvotes too.
Coming back to your point on curation trail. I am not too sure how much that will help. Your votes are typically quite insignificant when you are still a minnow. I will rather you browse around your favorite topics and follow some authors that you like. Interact with them and build deeper relationships. Steem is a social platform after all. Therefore it is important to make friends. If you really like an author, you can then subscribe for auto-voting via services like SteemAuto.
To sum it up, be more patient in building your presence on Steem. You will find the journey more rewarding if you take it easy and do it one step at a time :)