About a year ago, I had some success with my first #Steemit Post: https://steemit.com/travel/@maui/my-own-photos-from-home-here-in-maui-hawaii generating $1,315.74, 205 votes, and 43 comments (many of which were my own replies.) I was astonished at the positive response and internal traffic. The only external social media promotion I did was via my Maui Twitter account with a single tweet resulting in 1,894 impressions but only 33 link clicks. So, obviously the Steemit community was responsible for most of the traffic.

That begged the big questions:

Would promoting a Steemit post heavily with external social media increase exposure and reach enough existing Steemit users and encourage enough new users to have a larger effect? Does external traffic affect votes, ranking, and monetization?

So, I gave it a shot! Steemit is right up my alley. And though the ins and outs of Crypto-currency and how this all functions is pretty foreign to my artist brain (I have my friend @logicwins to help me understand that part), some aspects perfect for me. I've built my business around driving traffic to unique, quality content via social media channels. In doing so, we've needed to have strong social media profiles. Our strongest channel is one of our Facebook pages with 396,000+ followers where we often reach over 1/2 a million people per week. And though we have large followings on instagram, Periscope, and across Twitter, Facebook is really the best way for us to drive traffic externally.

We created this post: The Best Islands In The World For Vacation

What we did to promote this new post was share it across Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google+, and our Paper.li weekly Newsletter. Usually we schedule promotions over a week or so, but since these posts need love within the first 24 hours, we did it all at the same time (moments after the post was published on Steemit.)

In the first 24 hours, our Facebook promotion alone amassed the following impressions and engagement (see screenshot): 108,481 people reached, 3,218 reactions, and 2,730 link clicks. We were told that this post was the second most shared posts on the web from the Steemit website during the past week.

And our post did this: 5 votes, $7.16, 2,733 views, and 7 comments (3 of which were my own replies.)

Was it additionally successful due to the external social media promotion? It doesn’t look that way. I guess the audience at Steemit is too narrow for me to blast to the general public and hope it’d have a positive reaction.

Was the post successful purely from the existing Steemit community? No. But I believe the quality of the post may have a factor in both the social promotion affect and the regular Steemit community affect. Though I’d added some personal photos of me with a monkey on my head and myself surfing, it wasn’t personal enough. It was a little too blanket-blah-promotional-listy-crappolaish. I thought building an infographic would help, but no. I bet If I’d tested this with a post about my day on Maui with photos from that day, it’d do much better.

Should I experiment yet again, only this time sharing a recent sunset and my family’s shenanigans around it? Maybe that’d play better to every audience than a bunch of pretty pictures of multiple islands. I’d love your comments on how I should tweak my next Steemit experiment. Mahalo in advance!

And, if anyone gives a damn, here are some photos of myself with friends and family this weekend at Iao Stream and the Maui Film Festival. ALOHA!