When we judge our rewards and votes are not enough on Steem, how do we stay motivated and remember why we are here instead of giving up? What works for me is reaching out to help the many people I love on Steem because this allows me to remember why I am here which is to learn how to love and be of service creating a world I will want to come back to.

I have had many days where downvotes, comments, the Steem price, witness votes, and other user activity had me down on Steem. I questioned why I was here and what good I was doing. Every time the answers came back to people as I remembered posts I read here that helped me start gardening, be a better husband, plan a future home in sustainability instead of extravagance, stay motivated about cryptocurrencies, and get through the dip.

The secret for me is to focus relentlessly on helping others while also maintaining a balance in taking care of ourselves. For example, I have found resteeming several times more often than I post leaves me feeling happier than trying to maximize my earnings with multiple posts each day. With this mindset in place, I hope the questions and answers below I often see and hear will prove useful to stick with Steem on a tough day!

How to Earn More Upvotes on Posts?

---

Focusing on giving the most value to each reader with my posts, bringing new users to Steem from organic search by considering what people might search for, and helping other authors earn guarantees that I get enough earnings over the course of my life here on Steem. If the earnings we get do not seem enough today, we are likely for that judgement not to change even when the payouts do. When we see that our earnings today are enough, we can relax and just post every day instead of obsessing about how much we make.

While you might interject that "you earn so much on each post you cannot understand how I feel with my zeroish earnings," you might also like to know that for the first several YEARS and ~500 blog posts I made on http://jerrybanfield.com/blog-posts/ as well as on several other blogs and websites, I earned zero on 99% of my posts. In fact, if you total all my costs like website hosting and promoting my website, I SPENT MONEY TO BLOG for the first five or so years I did it. I understand about earning nothing after spending hours writing a post and I did not give up for lack of making money on my posts because I write primarily to help readers.

On Steem, as soon as I started looking more at the earnings on posts I resteemed and on those I wished to help than at my own earnings, a magical transformation happened where my earnings became enough and I stopped feeling the need to care how much I got on individual posts. I love hearing how my resteem led to a hundred more upvotes coming in within 24 hours and I love seeing a big upvote come in on a post I resteemed regardless of whether I had anything to do with it.

Ideal Posting Frequency?

---

Once daily works best for me to post because less than this makes consistency more challenging while more than this leads to burnout and an obsession with our own rewards. I have tested more and less frequent posting with ending up comfortable in once a day. Each day I intend to do one Steem post and most days that happens. This maximizes my chance to make a post that makes a big impact while allowing me to focus on just the one post and feel finished posting for the day after the one post is up.

Downvotes, Failures, and Losses?

---

Proof of effort! In one year here I have a laundry list of projects I started and so far have not finished, posts with huge downvotes, losses from bids on voting bots, and more failures which I choose to think of as learning experiences. Each one ironically helped me to improve greatly here and adjust my strategies to be more useful with less struggle. Some of the big downvotes led to building new and deeper relationships than I could have hoped to imagine making without them.

What makes failures and losses easier is looking inside. When I am okay with what I did, then whatever everyone else does is their business and nothing personal. In fact, the critical feedback often becomes exactly what I need to hear. Sometimes I wait a week before I even read it to get some perspective and learn to let go before reengaging.

Steem Price Ups and Downs?

---

We feel powerless when we focus on things we do not control like the Steem price and powerful when we focus on what we can control like writing posts, reading comments, and upvoting others. I limit checking anything I do not control to an "as needed" basis with attention to rationalizations making up excuses.

Tonight I checked the Steem price because I sold some Steem to one of my partners and therefore needed to know the conversion rate. I have a notification on my phone to tell me when the price goes over $10 for 1 Steem to eliminate the need to check unnecessarily. When I make a bid on a bot at https://steembottracker.com/ I check the price to see whether to use Steem or SBD and how much to send. Outside of places I need to be aware of the price, I avoid checking it.

Sometimes days pass where I have no idea whether Steem is $1 or $10 and it does not matter because I am not intending to sell all my Steem.

Overwhelmed?

---

During the times I have been most frustrated on Steem, I stepped back the most without taking any drastic actions like powering down and waited until sanity returned. I made my one post a day and then make time for other parts of my life besides Steem. Every time after a week or so I was ready to get back into my normal habits of reading posts, commenting, and engaging in the community.

What many of my missteps have shown me in life is that my impatience often costs me everything I was hoping to get and leaves me starting over. Getting excited about Steem, posting every day, and quitting because the rewards are not enough leaves a lot of us missing out on 99.999% of the opportunity here as does buying Steem, powering up, participating for a while, powering down out of frustration, selling at a loss or small gain, and then telling everyone how bad Steem is.

Today I show up each day with the hope to be helpful here by resteeming 3 to 5 posts written other authors a day, writing my own post, and chatting on discord. I experience the same discomforts that the rest of us do here and each time I am motivated to deepen my relationships here the most when I am uncomfortable.

Thank you for reading this post which I hope is helpful for you to get through the next challenge on Steem and to stick with us!

Love,

Jerry Banfield

Shared on:

• Facebook page with 2,256,504 likes.
• Twitter to 101,590 followers.

Let's stay together?

• If you want to stay updated via email, will you sign up either to get new emails daily at http://jerry.tips/steemposts or join at http://jerry.tips/emaillist1017 to get an email once a week with highlights?
• If you would like to chat, will you please visit https://jerrybanfield.com/contact/ because there we see the best ways to contact me?

Our Most Important Votes on Steem are for Witness!

• If you do not know what a witness is on Steem, will you please read https://steemit.com/steemit/@gmichelbkk/what-is-a-steem-witness-how-to-vote-and-why because our votes for witnesses determine our future together here on Steem?
• If you have never made a witness vote before, will you please set me as a proxy at https://steemit.com/~witnesses or https://steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-proxy?proxy=jerrybanfield&approve=1 because you will feel good about helping select witnesses while I do all the work to maintain the votes for you?
• If you already have voted for witnesses and prefer to update your own witness votes, will you please place your vote using at https://steemit.com/~witnesses or https://steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=jerrybanfield&approve=1 because most of us feel a sense of belonging here when we begin choosing our witnesses?