Interacting outside of Steem is huge.
Commenting is also huge to help you grow your earnings in the beginning, but I don't think it does much for your true followers. What I mean is your follower count will go up, but won't do much to help with interactions/upvotes on your pots (from what I've seen).
Overall, great advice and just thought I'd share my experiences to this point.
it helped somewhat for me, but I need to remind those lazy fools every week XD