The Three Cs of Hive Success - Power House Creatives Contest

For those of us who have been around the platform for awhile, it’s easy to forget that there is so much to learn when you are just getting started. But the fact is, the learning never stops.

I’m going to outline my recommendations for the top three activities that will help set you on the path to success. Keep it simple, especially at first, while you're learning. This is not the definitive guide, but it will help you set up a good foundation of activities.

Image source: Pixabay

The Three C’s of Success on Hive

The three C's of hive success are Community, Content and Curation. I'll share my personal insights on all three of these.

Community
Browse the communities on Hive and find some that resonate with you. Note that it can be very overwhelming, and it would can be very hard to be an active member in more than a few.

I like having a “home” community and then several others where I try to visit, engage and curate. Power House Creatives is my home community. I’m also active in The Ink Well, and I author a Writing Tips post each week for fiction writers in that community, and look for great creative posts to curate. I’m also an Actifit member, and I post about physical activity and the outdoors daily. There are several others where I visit and curate as well (OCD, Freewriters, The City of Neoxian, Photography, Palnet and WednesdayWalk for example) but I recommend starting with three and then stretching further if it’s comfortable for you.

The most important thing about communities is engaging with others and getting to know them. If you make friends, connect with others, comment on and curate their posts, and engage with members in their Discord community, you will make meaningful connections that sustain you.

Those meaningful connections are the foundation of everything. People who come to the platform just to post in the hope of getting upvotes and making money are never successful.

Content

When you have browsed communities and looked through the types of things people post, it will help you to hone in on what you want to post about. You can see how people create signatures, and build a kind of repertoire of content.

There are many ways to be successful with content, but here are a few of the “do’s and don’ts” I personally follow:

• Do: Be thoughtful about what you write. Think about how it will interest, entertain or enlighten others.

• Do: Write at least a few paragraphs of content, but hopefully at least a “page.” One sentence and a picture (even a good picture) is sort of frowned upon. It doesn’t take a lot of time to share some information. Where was the picture taken? Why did you take that picture? What do you love about it? A few paragraphs of information will show that you put in some effort and you’re not just here for upvotes.

• Do: Post on a schedule, if possible. I recommend picking a starting point that feels manageable, like one or two days per week. Maybe one day you share information and pictures about a cooking or baking project and the other day you post pictures from places in nature you like to visit. It’s completely up to you. But that schedule will help you to plan your week, and give you some structure.

• Do: Provide credit to the source of the pictures you use to illustrate your content. (And be sure to choose them from Creative Commons sources like Pixabay and Unsplash, not images you find in a Google search which 99% of the time are under copyright laws.)

• Don’t: Write junk posts. People won’t follow you or upvote you. Every post you write should be high quality. Period.

• Don't: Plagiarize other people's content. Never ever ever copy content that you have found elsewhere and post it as your own. Ever. (Citing a paragraph is okay, as long as you credit the source.)

• Don’t: Use the platform as a soapbox or spend your time whining, complaining or writing tirades. Negativity is exhausting. People will veer away from you.

• Don’t: Spread yourself too thin or try to write about all topics under the sun. It’s easy to burn out by starting out the gate doing too much, and then not being able to sustain it. Instead, if you start with a few topics where you are knowledgeable and have plenty of ideas, and plan to write just a few posts a week, you can find the sustainable cadence that works for you.

Curation

The third C is all about supporting others. My recommendation is to spend more of your time on this activity than you do posting. There is only one of you, and there are thousands of others, all creating posts about their lives and the things they love to do, or writing educational posts about cryptocurrency, cooking, gardening and so on. You could be successful on Hive by only posting once a month and putting all of the rest of your effort into finding great content to support.

Everyone loves to get some “love” for their content. Finding posts in your favorite communities, upvoting them and providing a high quality comment is one of the absolute best things you can do to grow on this platform.

What is a “high quality” comment?

Every comment you write should show that you actually read the post. Comment on something specific about that post that you liked. Respond to a specific point. Mention a particular thing that you liked. If the piece has some really great prose, or lovely lines of poetry, you can even quote that bit like this:

The sky was bright, like liquid lightning

Then say why you like that particular thing.

Be careful of over-curating

Your “voting power” (VP) is always regenerating. But if you let it get too low, it takes longer to regenerate. You can learn more about this and there are guides everywhere. But I personally try to keep my VP at or above 90% when I’m curating because then it will regenerate within 24 hours.

You can keep tabs on your VP at BeeMee.icu. Just log in with your account credentials, and then you can see all of your stats.

What are auto-curation and curation trails?

I’m personally a fan of auto curating via curation trails - not as my primary curation method but as a way to augment manual curation, as I am unfortunately too busy to be curating as often as I would like.

Auto-curation is a great method for super busy people like me. For example, I have a full-time job that is far more than full time, plus home and family, and I love to cook and be outdoors and I am also a fiction writer and have many projects in the works. So I only have an hour or two to spend on the platform per day.

You can set up curation trails at Hive.Vote: https://hive.vote/dash.php. You will need to log in with your Hive account credentials and your “Keystore password.” If you don’t have one, or have forgotten it, click the “Import account” button below the Sign In button, and then you can set one.

Once you are in, you can search for curation trails, such as the communities where you are active, as well as curation projects like Curie. (Note: Power House Creatives is “steemitbloggers.”)

Caution: Be sure to adjust the settings so that your auto-curation does not exhaust your VP!

In the main dashboard, select Settings, and then set a threshold. I recommend something above 90%. This means that you can auto-curate while you sleep! And when you wake up, you still have some room in your VP to curate some great content that you seek out.

Good luck! And be patient! It takes time to be successful, but if you keep at it you will get there.

This is my entry into the weekly contest by @zord189 on Power House Creatives.

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