I can only speak from my experience: Two months ago or so I joined and wrote a couple of posts, and put a lot of work into them.
None of them picked up, and in the mean time a lot of (very frankly) poor quality content was trending day after day.
I'm currently giving this outlet a second try, but it doesn't seem like it will be any better the second time around.
Probably you need to work to get an audience. Right now the best way to get rewards is to get a lot of followers. Best way to achieve that is to produce more than a couple of good posts. If you have several good posts and you promote yourself by leaving intelligent comments to other posts, you might have a good future here.
Your audience isn't going to pop up magically, you have to do something to attract it first. Of course miracles can happen sometimes but just wishing for them isn't a good strategy.
Totally agree @samupaha. In my opinion it's not clear for new users. They think they can win without networking and promoting correctly the post. Building an audience remains a key point in this new economy as innovative as it can be, you still have to promote it if you don't have followers, otherwise it will mostly be invisible, or you need to be lucky
Thats how i explain the post activity decrease because of this new phase. People start to understand and prepare their strategy rather than posting quality content that will end with low payout and frustration
Well that's a real problem. But i do still believe in steem in the long term. And how we can solve different problem in the old and boring economy.
Look when i see some useless content auto-voted by Bots doing 100$ after 1hours, when my post is right now at 43 votes, 0.68$, I don't care. If i do 1000$ it's great (maybe even not deserve that much), and if i no 2$ whatever, What you build here, is reputation, commitment to a long term project that can disrupt an old model. I'm pretty confident that if you keep being consistant with good contents and build your network you will be rewarded.
Otherwise we would just have to move on other platform like Synereo to try. But i think Steem will adapt fast. For now the voting power feature is a problem. People think they can't vote 100% because it will waste their entire power in only One unique vote...
So average rewards/vote as well as total payout will get lower and lower for a few days until it's fixed
Thanks for your feedback @psychonaut, appreciate
Totally agree @samupaha. In my opinion it's not clear for new users. They think they can win without networking and promoting correctly the post. Building an audience remains a key point in this new economy as innovative as it can be, you still have to promote it if you don't have followers, otherwise it will mostly be invisible, or you need to be lucky
Thats how i explain the post activity decrease because of this new phase. People start to understand and prepare their strategy rather than posting quality content that will end with low payout and frustration
I've studied the platform here extensively since I joined a month ago. While some of my posts have been pretty successful, not all of them have. Since I write in a pretty consistent tone and use a standard format of paragraphs of varying size, sub-heads, bolded and italicized words, and colorful images in my posts, I wondered what made some successful and others not so much. It was often the ones I least expected to be moneymakers that took off, while ones I expected to do well did not. After looking at the trending posts, the users who consistently HAD trending posts, and other things, it became clear to me that networking really IS key to getting good results from most of your posts. I've started trying to do more of that, kind of like building my brand on here. But, it's difficult. People mostly don't comment back when I comment on something of theirs, so it's hard to get a conversation going. I've been to the chat room, but with so many sections, it's hard to know where to go to strike up a conversation. I've tried a few times without really being able to engage anyone. I do have some followers, and people who upvote my posts consistently, but I'd like to increase that number, and I seem to have reached a plateau with what I can do without networking more. Learning to network properly and get people to engage with me more here is something I will be studying, and will hopefully learn the secret. :)
The secret is Whales. Since you can get an upvote which worth more than 100 other minnow votes... (in rewards i mean)
So you should get whales upvote, but you cant force them to vote for you or to spam them with useless content or non-targeted ones. Because most people try to do it and its annoying for them.
Building network is the key yes. You should build an audiance according to your topics and also promote your content. People just start to understand that there s no magic in here, good content is never enough by itself, it needs promotion and networking, as well as.. Luck :)
So good luck to you @stephmckenzie :)
ps: by the way you did more than thousand dollars in a month posting on Steemit ;) i do think you're in the lucky ones ;)
Thanks for the words of encouragement, @ekitcho. I've had whales upvote my my content more times than not, which is great. And, I added up my total from my first month on Steemit yesterday, and I actually made more money here than I did at my main writing gig (mainly because I spent most of my time here instead of there), so I'm really pleased about that. I'll keep doing what I'm doing, which is posting high quality content, and commenting and voting on other people's content. What I REALLY want to do is increase my followers and reputation here, which seems to be trickier than getting good pay on a post. But, I'm studying the environment here, trying to engage with others, and working on it. :)