I really can understand why so few use them (trending/hot/new). Trending is all whales for the most part (the same ones), hot sometimes has some good stuff but there is a lot of spillover from hot and with new everything scrolls off in 30 seconds or less.
Couple this with some of the cultural disconnect from people all over the world here and it skews the feeds bad. I think as time goes on more people will rely solely on people in their feeds or resteemed by those in their feeds. I think one edge that is serving you well and will continue to grow is bringing your husband, sister and some from your social circle on here. It multiplies your odds of being seen as you all feed energy to one another.
One last thought about visibility. Your merging your picture onto another is a good branding technique. I used it kind of in my writing, but I suck at that and you could always see the outline. I never could master photoshop and half assed it with Gimp.
I actually do it all on my iphone! I use an app called "eraser" which is cheap $.99 maybe. The other tool I use then is a free one called "photo layer" which allows me to lay that one on top of any pic, I use the free attribute ones from unsplash.com and credit the photographer.
nice tip here on eraser
I think you had mentioned steemit posts showing up on google before? Was that you?
Yes, I mentioned that on another post.
Can you offer up any tips to make better use of that? Like how to title you post for better search results? Appreciate any help with this you can offer. I know payouts are only for 7 days but if a post you wrote months ago still brings people to your account then there is definitely benefits there
I am not a Google expert, never used their analytics or anything. I am about to start writing my series on self publishing and when I get to marketing I will cover more of what I know regarding Google search.
The best tip I can give you right now without writing up a full post (which will be coming in the next month) is to experiment with what you would type into Google search. It isn't a guarantee you will get first page, but at least it will be something natural people would search for. Looking over your posts none of them I glanced at would ever be something someone would be likely to type into the search.
Thanks for the tip and for taking to time reply. I will keep that in mind when making my posts.