I have my Steemit account! what do I do now?. (Help for beginners)

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Welcome!

Welcome Steemitnauts, I hope you are having a wonderful day and that after you finish reading this publication, your day will be even better.

Today we are going to be talking about some important points that we should all know and that if you are new to steemit you probably don't know about yet, so if you have doubts, if you need answers, if you are willing to learn, get ready to clarify some doubts that you didn't even know you had.

Let's start from zero

So, we're at home and suddenly someone gives us some information about this wonderful project called "Steemit." They advise us to open an account, and tell us to study a little bit of the page so that when they accept us, we already know how to move in it; after a few days, we finally get that so long awaited confirmation email, they approved our account! now what?

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They approved our account, now what?

Well, it took a while but we finally have our account; we've already saved our password very carefully so we don't lose it, and yes, we're inside of Steemit, now what do we do?

In order to not get stucked just looking at the screen all day long without understanding anything, we asked for some help and hopefully we find a publication like this that gives us some information so we can solve some doubts; the first thing we should do is to read this.

Once we got this done, we'll set up our profile.

We are going to change the profile photo and the background photo, then we are going to write some relevant information (an advice would be not to share too much; a little bit of information about what we are going to be writing should be enough) we are going to say where we are from (if we want people to know it) a website (if we want to share it) and that's it.

Now that our profile is set, we are going to look for some relevant people to follow. To do this, we will go to the upper right corner of the screen and click on explore.

Here we can review the tags that get our attention (things related to the things we like) these are the publications that will appear daily among our favorites, so the idea is to look for some profiles with content of our interest.

After finding a publication, we click on the title, go to the author's profile and then click on follow.

Note: Let's be careful not to do Spam; it's not well seen to walk around leaving our publications or asking for votes from others, we don't want to ask for "upvotes 4 upvotes" or "follow 4 follow", unless we want to be flagged and ignored by the whole community.

Having our profile and some authors to follow, we can start publishing. The idea is to wait until you have some followers and till you know a little bit about the page before you throw your posts into oblivion (if we don't have anyone following us, it's very likely that nobody will see them).

What to publish?

The content of our publications depends entirely on us, on what we like and want to share; the ideal would be, to be clear about the topic we are going to write about and trying to write it in an understandable way, always trying to keep the reader interested.

To help us write, we can use a notebook, Word, blog, notepad, etc. and write the title of what our publication will be. For example:

“The cats of my city.”

With this in mind, we will write at least 5 points to talk about. For example.

1) They have beautiful colors.
2) They shed a lot of hair.
3) There are of many races.
4) There are many stray cats.
5) I would like to do something to help them.

After having an idea and a few important points, we will have to develop each one of them.

Once identified our theme, we start writing.

We will try to write our content in an orderly way; taking care of the spelling, the punctuation marks, trying to take care of the number of paragraphs (not just a bunch of letters united in a single block) centering the titles, aligning the text, justifying, etc.

We don't want to make our publication too short, let's show that we put our effort into it, so readers will appreciate it more. (We're not trying to write a new law either) between 500 and 1500 words, will be enough.

There are programs like "Word" that helps us to correct our spelling and can also tell us how many words we have written so far.

As I mentioned earlier, we can basically talk about whatever we want, we just have to try to be polite and respectful, the ideal would be to write about something that we think may interest others and give it our personal spark, which in the end is what will differentiate us from those other people who choose to write about this same subject or something similar, we can make it different.

Pictures.

It is always important to take advantage of the resources like pictures/gifs to illustrate a little our publication, we can use between 1 and 5 pictures, let's not exaggerate.

Source.

It is very important that we provide the source of the images and other things that we use from the internet, to place the link of the site from where we get the image, not just pasting the google link, we are going to show the link of the page where the image comes from, giving it the importance that the author deserves; there are users that dedicate themselves to look for publications without sources to denounce them, so we are going to avoid this, besides, publications with sources look more proffesional.

Tags.

Once we have our content ready, we will look for the pertinent tags, these will place our publication among those that has the same tags; for example, if we publish under the label #chocolatecake, our publication will be next to all those that are labeled in the same way; some of the most used are #blog, #writing, #life, etc.

I've already published my post, now what?

Be patient. It's very common for us to get frustrated if our first publications don't get the attention we want, but after all, not many people know us yet, so what can we do?

Keep creating community, there are places like the Steemitchat where we can talk to people from all over the world, promote our posts and read other people's posts; just try to check the rules before you start leaving your stuff anywhere, this can be considered spam and we can be banned, flagged and ignored forever; but I know you appreciate your work, and you wouldn't do that.

Don't worry, there are groups that search, find and recognize good content, such as @ocd, @curie, @steemstem, etc.

We don't have to worry so much about that, they will see us, I assure you, we'll just concentrate on doing a good job and they'll come.

In case you want to publish in another language, do yourself a favor and don't just copy the text in the google translator without knowing what you are doing, let's make sure we know what it says, let's write everything correctly (so the translation would be a little more accurated); if we have the possibility, the best thing to do is to find someone to help us with the translation. A poorly translated text can cause us to lose followers, quite the opposite of what we are looking for.

Upvotes.

"Upvote" is something similar to "liking" but much more relevant as it helps to improve the position of our publications and comments, we just need to click on this arrow and we're set. (Please, don't upvote yourselves).

Some last words.

Enough for the moment, the idea is not driving you crazy with too much information, remember that this is just a part of a serie of publications that we'll be writing to help us each other; remember to be consistent; if you thought this publication was too long, you may have to put a little more love to Steemit or look for something else to do, there are many people in here who want to do the same that we do, and we have to keep educating ourselves about it.

I hope to see you in the next publication where we will be talking about some frequently asked questions, most used terms, html code, etc.

¡Welcome and Enjoy!