This is correct. the only way to improve your reputation is to post quality content and hope to get upvoted.
When you get rewards from posts, you need to convert that to steem and ultimately steem power. This makes your own votes more worthy and therefore you get more curation rewards, and can even upvote your own content which will contribute to reputation.
Curation rewards will therefore also help, so start upvoting good content. But the fastest way is to be noticed by others for your work.
Sucks that other social networks make it so hard to share Steemit (or any other) links now, I have thousands of followers on Facebook. Guess I'll have to just build slow and steady. I found it odd that at 39, my reputation just seemed to stop growing after growing quickly from 25-39 and my pattern of using Steemit not really changing. Are my posts being flagged? If my posts get flagged where would I see that?
well even if you shared it to your facebook followers - it won't make any difference unless they sign up to steemit and upvote you. You don't get any benefit from simple views.
A slow and steady build is the way to go. build up your Steem Power - as having a lot of voting power is helpful.
One thing you need to realise is that the growth of reputation is exponential - that is - the difference between 25-26 is a lot less than the difference between 39-40
https://steemit.com/steem/@sevinwilson/complete-overview-of-reputation-score-how-it-s-calculated-and-how-to-increase-it-reputation-score-table-included
you can see in raw score terms, jumping from 25 to 26 just requires 291,549,665 reputation points.
jumping from 39 to 40 requires 10,477,751,698, which is 35 times as much as the jump from 25 to 26.
If they can click on my website it could make a difference even if they didn't join Steemit lol I did not realize how it's calculated. Honestly there;s so much to learn compared to say Minds, that it's hard for me to get it all straight. Now I see why my reputation is taking longer to go up, thanks for the reply!
it wouldn't make a difference if they click through from your website - you'd get a view but not a vote.
My website is where people actually buy my art, not Steemit though. So, simple views where my link is clickable, are awesome in my books, Steemit upvotes or not ;)