Amazing and thoughtful comment, thank you so much. As I'm sure you've worked out, yes, I'm a total noob here. I've been trying to upvote/reply to every nice comment that has come my way (and there's been a fair few of them so far!) but yes I have noticed that my page views are very, very low by comparison to my own publishing platforms which have exponentially more reach. I didn't realise that Steem power affected that in any way, so wouldn't have bothered powering down in that case, thanks for that info.
Currently my strategy is just to get everyone from all my other platforms to open Steemit accounts and follow/support my work here. Maybe that is "cheating" but I've had more than a dozen people sign up accounts already and I've only just started telling people to join. Eventually pretty sure I can get hundreds if not thousands to migrate :)
Thanks for the tips, deeply appreciate it!