The first few days on Steemit can be both exciting and frustrating. You get excited knowing about platform and its potential. You start blogging hoping to become the next whale. You don't see the response you were expecting on your posts.
Most of the minnows will fall into this category unless they are hugely talented or very lucky. If you are both then you are already a whale and you know what you need to do ;) But to most of the minnows out there or new steemians I would suggest a simple thumb rule that keeps you afloat.
50:100:200:25
This rule can be explained as follows.
Follow at-least 50 interesting people
Any social network is only as interesting as your feed. As first step head to https://steemit.com/trending and follow 50 interesting people. If you want to speed up this process follow an interesting person and then checkout the people they are following. For example if you find me interesting you can find the people I am following on https://steemit.com/@steemladder/followed Follow people who have common interests as you. Once you do this you will observe that your feed becomes interesting https://steemit.com/@steemladder/feed and you would enjoy spending time on steemit if you are not into writing posts or earning from them.
Comment on at-least 100 posts
Once your feed has become interesting indulge yourself in reading the interesting posts. Even if you are not into writing you can leave a couple of lines as comments on the interesting posts adding your opinion. This will make the author happy that people are engaging on his articles and if your comment is insightful they might follow you as well. I have followed a lot of people based on their comments. Kindly refrain from comments like "I will follow you, you follow me". This is not beneficial to either of you in the long run and will generally put off people.
Upvote at-least 200 posts
Keep visiting https://steemit.com/created and upvote interesting posts. This will make sure that minnows like you don't feel the same as you felt when you were a newbie. I would suggest splitting 100 votes on new posts and 100 by the posts from your feed. If you cross this number early don't let it stop you. Keep upvoting good content in their early stages. It is this curation that will make steemit a better platform.
Write atleast 25 posts
If you think that you are a good writer. Write atleast 25 good posts before giving up on steemit. This is the target I am keeping for myself and I hope I would have had a decent number of followers by the time I finish my 25th post. Remember to write posts because you like to write and help people and not with the sole intention of rewards. If you write with the sole intention of earning rewards there is a chance that you might feel bad when things don't work out, wheras if you write because you love to write you are already content and rewards are only an additional bonus.
Happy steeming. Are you a whale, dolphin or a minnow. Do let me know in comments if these suggestions make sense to you.
Some readers asked if all of the above should be done at once. That is not suggested and you cannot do it if you are a newbie as there are bandwidth limitations as mentioned by @nikv in this comment. You can follow a more moderate approach mentioned by @creativesensei in this comment.