I've been here a long time, since before what is now called Hive was known as Steemit. Having found out about this back in Spring/early Summer 2016 from a crypto contact of mine. I lurked for a year and watched tutorial videos about Steemit on YouTube in order to learn best practices (I do my due diligence) before officially joining in July, 2017.

So I've seen a lot in that time...

Seen a lot of people come and go on the platform and have seen some burn bright, before fading away over the cycles of time. In the five years that I've actually been blogging, I think I've had posts that landed at the top of trending 3 times maybe? Possibly due to my responsibilities here with work, classes and taking care of the beloved matriarch of our family who is in ill health and has been abandoned by other family members who only stop over to get money from her.

She's more important to me right now than anything else as I'm the only one providing care and support, refusing all offers of payment except in the form of the delicious meals she insists I accept. She loves to cook, and in my family refusing a meal from her is a capital offense! :)

So I come at this with a different perspective than most do. I have multiple social media accounts and a much larger audience outside of Hive I think because classes, work and taking care of my relative meant I never had the time to post 7 days a week and 365 days a year in order to build those connections necessary to be one of the "cool kids" on Hive.

I blog when I can, and sometimes my responsibilities keep me away for days or even weeks at a time.

But I always return.

So I've never really been a "big man on campus" here, but its never discouraged me in the least. Back when I was new and nobody was reading my posts, I noticed that people were responding to tweets from some of the many Twitter accounts I had that I'd written months before.

A lot of people may not realize that Google indexes tweets. So, I'd give my take on a subject in January, and then receive a response to it in April or May. That's one of the reasons that I share every post I make (and from some other Hive and LeoFinance brothers) on Twitter.

I've never been one of those guys used to getting $20, $40 and $100 upvotes. If you are, congrats and enjoy it. I'm happy for you. But if you're like me, don't get discouraged. Even if you're not being seen on Hive, your posts are being seen on Google, and its one of the reasons I write with Google in mind instead of trying to catch fickle lightening in a bottle.

Why We Blog

You also have to have I believe, a really good reason for blogging here in the first place. If you're doing it only for the money, what happens if that all goes away? I've seen it happen as they got used to sucking on the seemingly ever-flowing teats of huge upvotes, and that alone was their rasion d'etre.

What brought me here was seeing my work stolen on another platform. A foreigner unwilling to put the time in and learn English, saw that my posts were more polished than his and decided to to copy them while removing my byline.

Like him, some regions of the world have developed a reputation for plagiarism as a shortcut to developing their own unique voices while blogging on Hive. It saddens me to see bloggers from countries in West Africa now being stained by association with others in their region who copy and paste the work of native English speakers as their own.

We've seen the 'Nigerian Prince email scam' here so many times, that people have trained themselves to delete any email originating from Nigeria. A lot of the money stolen comes from the life savings of elderly people who are taken in by this scam. How anyone can sleep at night celebrating a "win" over a confused senior citizen is a mystery to me. If you believe in God you must know that you will face him one day as the full horror of your well-deserved punishment awaits.

What Hive offered me was a place where I had ownership of my own content and a community that would respond if such wholesale content theft ever occurred again. But more importantly, it restored my love of blogging.

Every Comment Is A Blessing, Every Upvote, A Miracle

I'll never forget the day I received my first significant upvote. It was from someone in Australia, and was for a thoughtful comment I left on someones post. Because trust me, back then no one was seeing my posts! :) You'd have thought I won the powerball jackpot. It was for 35 cents I think, But I was pumped that somebody actually saw my work and took a few seconds out of their day to recognize it.

That was all I needed to keep going, because it meant that my work could be seen along with the $100 rewards of someone uploading a picture of their zero content and zero effort post of a baloney sandwich. :)

No one owes you an upvote, so don't become dependent on them. If you're getting them that's great, but they're here today and gone tomorrow, so keep building up your network, knowledge, and skillset.

It was the messages on Twitter that helped me to realize the impact I was having outside of the blockchain about my work on the blockchain.

Those little zero (or a few pennies, each treasured) upvote posts I was writing while not having any traction or engagement on Hive, were being seen (and more importantly responded to) on Google. So while I have "only" 1600 followers here, I'm reaching even more people outside. This gives my posts far more leverage than shown by the engagement and upvote totals themselves.

Confidence, And A Sense Of Self

I'm writing this mostly for the new people joining Hive and those who've been here awhile and may think their posts aren't having an impact. You cannot be wedded to the upvote numbers some people are getting. That stuff is like a shooting star that burns bright, then fades away. It reminds me of fickle teenaged girls who swear fealty and scream for their favorite boy band, only to drop them the following year when the next hot new group comes along.

You need to have confidence in your own work and abilities, and a sense of self that exists outside of the passions of the moment. Know that your work is being seen, and take comfort in that fact.

No matter what the amount is at the bottom of your posts, you're bigger than that number in experience, skills, and wisdom.

Always keep positivity at the forefront of everything you do.

As my grandmother often said: "Never put all your eggs in one basket." She grew up on a farm so she knew what she was talking about. There's a whole wide world out there, I've seen platforms come and go (remember Geocities? Expand and plant your stake everywhere, so you're not dependent on any one source. A good writer develops skills that can be used at anyplace and anytime.

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The other day, I received a message about a tweet I'd published promoting one of my Hive posts. The shocking thing is that it was about an article I'd written six months ago. He saw my Hive post on Google and decided to contact me via Twitter. This stuff happens to me all the time where an indexed tweet on a search engine will lead them back to me.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, we should all be promoting each others posts on Twitter. I've often liked and re-tweeted the link to other members work on Hive and LeoFinance, but almost never see my efforts returned. If someone has taken the time to promote your Hive post to their Twitter audience, consider doing the same for them in return. Let's use legacy social media to bring people home to Hive.