Thank you for your input @guarddog! You know, I think the complete randomness of Steemit upvotes should not be forgotten and I think that's a part of the platform that might be hard for newbies to understand or recognize at first. People sometimes greet newbies by upvoting their posts to very high payouts, but that's mostly a one time thing, after which the newbie gets many low paying posts. It's not necessarily about quality, but simply lucky timing (that still goes for my posts aswell!). The longer you're around, the more meaningful followers you get who generally upvote your posts, because they care about your content, so you basically managed to slowly grow your baseline payout.
The randomness stays, but the way to increase your chances of being seen is mainly to gather more followers. Meaningful followers, not the ones who follow you, only so you'll follow them back. Think about the topics you like to talk about or write about and then go on the hunt for others with topics like those. If you strike up a conversation with those people, they might follow you and care about the content you post. Those are the ones who are most likely to upvote you or even resteem you. It's something you will probably understand already (proof is basically in the fact that you write a meaningful comment on this post), but not all newbies do.
So true. I'm finding so many posts that I really like but still have to be mindful of which ones get a VOTE.
Oh yes! I completely understand. It's really harder for you, because you can't adjust your voting weight yet, so you'll burn through your voting power quite quickly.