Growth and the power of passive income
I am not going to sugar coat it for new users - Steem/hive is hard to start off with. Blogging and commenting for hours often just for a few cents - this is why many leave! However, the more time you put in, engaging and creating good content, the more your Hive holdings and earning potential grows. As you earn more Hive you gain a new way to earn passive income - delegations. Alternatively you can earn rewards through manual curation. I have gone the way of delegations, and was surprised when I recently checked my wallet that I am now receiving about 0.5 Hive per day is passive income just by delegating to great projects!
The projects I am delegating to here on Hive are manual curation projects - @curangel, @ocdb and @qurator, and so I know my HP is in good hands! To me these projects have proven themselves and thus I am happy delegating to them. In return they generally pay out some of their curation rewards to delegators - this is the passive income I am talking about. To put it simply, this is much like putting money in a term deposit - the bank uses your money and pays you out in interest.
The great thing about this for me is that I plan to power up the majority of the hive that I earn, and so I can delegate more to these (and other) great projects on Hive, and thus my passive income will keep increasing. The only downside for me is that my upvote will never be worth much which could make it harder for me to attract followers (some follow accounts with alot of SP). However, are those the followers I really want? Not really! And anyway I am still supporting the community, just in a different way. I trust that these projects are out there everyday hunting down great and under rated content and giving them some love!ç
Hive/Steem has come along way since I joined where blogging was one of the only ways to earn and grow your account. Now there are MANY ways to earn, such as through exercise with @actifit, photography, gaming with @splinterlands (and others), and as I have mentioned through manual curation and delegations.
My account is closing in on 3000SP/HP now and my aim is to get to dolhinhood by the end of the year (I should smash this goal easily!). It does seem that the first few months are the hardest here and it becomes easier. It is much like in the real world - I am sure earning the first million is alot harder than earning the second million!
Hope everyone is keeping well during this strange time :)
As a curator for @curangel I can confidently say that yes, there are people out there looking for good content, but it can be difficult to find at times.
As you rightly say, it can be difficult to get established here although I feel that many people come with a false expectation and when they don't make a gazillion hive in the first week they tend to either drift away or reduce their quality to levels commensurate with their rewards.
I believe the more a person puts into engagement with other users the better they will do. I don't mean mindless good post bro comments, or welcome to a new user, that stuff is nonsensical. I mean valid commenting on other people's posts, relavent replies that make sense and inspire a little interest.
Add to that some quality posting with a little passion and personality thrown in and all of a sudden a person is putting themselves in a position to start to build a platform.
Anyway, good luck with your brand and I hope you manage to attain your hive goal by the end of the year....And yes, I sent this for some vote love. :)
Yeah I remember it being Curie when I joined. I am sure they are doing a great job to, but @curangel got my attention and I love the project. Great to see people here caring about voting for good and engaging content!
I think its part of the perception of Steem from early on that didnt help. It did appear from the outside it was easy to earn good money / those shit posts on trending back when I joined were earning a few hundred, but what I didnt know was that most of that was paid upvotes and the actual earnings were far less.
Yeah I am the same. I have a small number of people I follow and engage with regularly.
Thanks for the support mate 😀
The bought-upvotes have caught many out in that they see some getting big rewards and feel demoralised with their much smaller reward on maybe what they see as better content.
My advice to newer users is as stated; Engage and apply passion and personality to blogs. I also tell people not to make it about the money but about the enjoyment...It takes the pressure off and that makes the writing easier...The money comes naturally.
It's also good to branch out a little, probe other people's blogs with a few comments, see how they respond and if favourable it may develop into another valuable connection.
From what I've seen you engage and do decent posts too. It's that engagement that is going to work well for you. I have people I vote on just because they engage with me; I don't agree with, or sometimes even like, what they post about, but they engage with me, are fun, and so get some votes. Engagement puts a person squarely in front of others...It should be promoted heavily here and those doing it will find great reward. Valid and relavent engagement I mean, not spam commenting like some do.
Yeah I may have become a bit lazy and stale in terms of finding new people to engage with! Thanks for the push in the right direction I might start hunting down some new people to follow and chat with :)
Cheers!
I think it's best to run your own race, so to speak. Focus on the things we've discussed in this comment thread: Engagement and good content. Control the controllable things as such. It's sometimes difficult when you see a bowl of soup get highly rewarded, or a nonsensical poem for that matter, especially if you've just put 3 hours into a 1500-word piece like I often do but we can't change that and so best to move on and just do our own thing.
Finding new people can be rewarding. I often look at who those I follow, follow. Often they have a few I am curious about and will engage a little to see if they're open to it and then go from there. Curating for curangel also means I see a lot of posts, much of it rubbish, but there's always a few hidden gems and people to engage with.
I'm glad I've been of some help.
All the best.