I was scrolling through my homepage timeline, looking for posts to curate, and I noticed that everyone I follow is doing really well on Steemit today:
In purely coincidental order we have:
@hanshotfirst
@jonny-clearwater
@kevinwong
@sykochica
All doing really, really well.
Follow the right people
The accounts I follow are rather diverse, and I follow them for different reasons.
Some are personal friends or other relations, some are up-and-comers who I think show good promise, and some are bigger content creators or developers who I can rely on to create top-level content that is not just good but will earn money.
Because I trust the people that I follow, I'm able to easily brows my timeline and upvote basically everything on there, because I follow people who create content and tools that I trust.
This doesn't happen with follow-4-follow
I've been seeing soooooo much f4f stuff on Steemit lately.
I've seen channels that have acquired about 900 followers in a week, but follow 5,000 accounts!!!
It might seem good to get that many followers in that amount of time, but when you look at the actual engagement on these accounts, it is very low compared to other channels of the same size that didn't get that way with the f4f approach. Votes are typically very low, and payouts are in the low dollars and cents.
The reason for this is that people who are doing f4f aren't looking to upvote other people's content -- they are playing a numbers game, hoping that if they follow enough people that a portion of them will follow back and a portion of them will actually curate and upvote.
It's better to grow an audience organically
Building an organic following will pay off much faster and much better than follow for follow.
So many new people seem to want to have it all NOW, and that ambition is clouding their judgment and preventing them from doing things that actually work on Steemit.
And as a result, that have what I can safely call a useless timeline. Their homepage is going to be a mess of random content, much of it plagiarized from YouTube. If you do what I do, your timeline will always be filled with great content to curate, and you won't be overwhelmed by a bunch of random stolen content, either! :D
I'll post later about how to build an organic following quickly and effectively.
But until then --