Why do we post on STEEMIT?
There are plenty of great platforms where you can post or start your own blog and make money that way. It amazes me that people keep coming to this platform and keep trying when for an average steemian working at McDonald’s is far more beneficial. 
So yeah okay people are here for the love of writing. I can go along with that. Writing has helped me in certain ways and I wish to keep doing it. But I also want to be successful and make money. I think I have spent enough time here to saynthe following with confidence:

**BEING SUCCESSFUL WITH FOLLOWERS**
You have only 10 votes per day to give out. It does not matter if you have 5000 followers. This works on reciprocity. You can’t really expect more than what you give. There is no way to keep up with the feed. I usually give my votes to people who comment on my post. At least I know they looked at it and interacted with me. So you may have many followers and yet hit a wall as you have no way to make everyone happy for their good work. I hate to comment without voting. 

**WRITE AMAZING POSTS**
You can try but you are likely to die trying before seeing your efforts pay off. There are many great posts daily. Most of these will be seen by just a few and never rewarded well enough. McDonald’s definitely has more potential. A platform that is not geared to pick and choose and promote fantastic work will never see profound, thought provoking writers persist. Time and effort of anyone carries a monetary value. Don’t pay your maid for 2 weeks and see if she makes an appearance on the 15 th day. 

**WHO GETS PAID**
Well go to the HOT section and look at the wallets. These are people who have steempower. These are the folks who invested in steem. Investing in steem is buying votes. When dollarvigilante or jerrybanfield write posts, see who votes. It is not a matter of content. It is about belonging to a club. Your are welcome to join with the required entry fee. It’s not a bad thing. It is just the way business is run. 

**WHAT SHOULD YOU DO**
I will tell you how I looked at it. 
If I write a post, it is my time and thus my money. For a serious post, I see it only as a learning experience as I learn from my research. I recently wrote about history of St Croix. It was purely the joy of learning. Something I would have done whether steemit existed or not. So write for your own growth. 
If you want to make money you have to buy votes. Either buy it by investing in steem or try the slow way of bots and stuff. 
I gave a lot of thought to investing in steemit. I almost did it. Then I realized that there are 2 kinds of folks on steemit.
1. Steem investors, who depend upon a ton of little steemians to keep steemit going.
2. Little steemians like me. 
I decided not to invest because the business model is not what I hoped for. More and more people will come to steemit but then also more and more people will be anti steemit due to the model. I do not have not proof of a business model that can grow in a positive way. They can’t do a whole lot to change anything. This is why they will try very hard to move steem away from steemit. That is impossible to achieve. A better strategy would have been to grow steemit by bringing in advertisers. Any ways understand this.
Don’t come here looking for money if you don’t have a few thousand to invest.
Stay for learning and be wiser from it. Most times if you scroll through 200 posts, more than a hundred will be on segwit2 cancelled or Bitcoin hits new high. There is nothing to see here. You will clearly see that great writers are not on this platform. Businessman are and you are feeding them. So really stay for the pleasures or writing and learning. Please buy votes. THAT'S WHAT EACH AND EVERY INVESTOR HAS DONE. IT IS THE BUSINESS MODEL OF STEEMIT ( by the looks of it).
![8C60A5EA-CF2F-4D05-B7D3-B7D3825B618A.jpeg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmUvJdnfwvrMDyr6RUmXsCaeMsYJhGoR4Zke8AdA65RABW/8C60A5EA-CF2F-4D05-B7D3-B7D3825B618A.jpeg)