Allen Taylor
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Hive is a Web3 social blogging platform where users can earn crypto rewards for posting and curating content. Unlike legacy social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, users can monetize their content from Day One. You don't need massive numbers of followers before you can monetize your content or prove that you deserve to be monetized by increasing your page views and traffic. Those are Web2 monetization methods that do not make sense for Web3.
Web3 is all about making the content creator more sovereign and providing creators as well as curators with more powerful tools for monetization, identity management, and censorship resistance. Hive does that better than any other Web3 social media platform.
While you can earn great rewards on Hive for your content creation and curation, you'll earn more faster if you follow these guidelines.
Hive is a social media platform. Like all other social media platforms, the idea is to meet new people and engage with your friends using the tools of the website. With Facebook, Twitter, and other Web2 social media platforms, users can rely on nameless and faceless algorithms to assist with community engagement, finding new people to follow, and increase their followers. That's not the way it works in Web3.
On Hive, you've got to be proactive in finding the content you want to interact with. However, Hive does offer some tools that make it easier.
To increase your earnings, you should make a regular habit of engaging with communities. That means commenting on other people's posts and responding to comments on your own. In fact, this is such a critical component to success on Hive that I recommend doing this before you create your first blog post. Spend a week or two, or perhaps even a month, finding great content on Hive to comment on. This will help people get familiar with you and learn who you are. On Hive, comments can earn decent rewards. You'll earn some rewards early on before you create your first blog post or video.
When you do create your first blog post, start with an introduction to yourself. It doesn't need to be long, but it should be interesting. Tell people who you are and why they should follow you.
Hive has a special hashtag for introducing oneself on the platform. Use the #introduceyourself hashtag to let others know it is your introduction post. On Hive, the first hashtag you use becomes the permanent hashtag and the one where users are most likely to find your content, so make sure the Introduce Yourself hashtag is the first one you use. You can use up to 7 hashtags on Hive, so after using the Introduce Yourself tag, tag your post to help others find it using common hashtags. Here are a couple of posts you can read to get a better feel for how to tag your Hive blog posts:
Because Hive is decentralized, there's no central repository for finding the right tags. You can either create your own tag or find one that is popular. You'll have better luck if you use a hashtag that is already in use rather than creating one that no one else knows about.
The best way to find suitable tags for your post is to find similar posts to yours and looking at the tags used for that post. You can do that in three ways:
Performing a Google search for similar content on Hive. For instance, if your blog post is about poetry, you can search for "poetry Hive.blog" to find other posts about poetry. You can do the same with any topic.
Search the Trending or Hot posts. On Hive, at the top of every page, you'll see a navigation menu. The leftmost menu item is "Posts". Click on that. Make sure you are on "All posts". On the top right of the page you'll see a dropdown menu. You can switch from Trending to Hot to New to Payouts and to Muted. I recommend scouring the Trending, Hot, and New posts to find similar posts to yours and looking at their tags. Your goal is to use tags that are popular so that your post will be found more easily.
Search Community posts. Another way to find suitable tags for your post is to search communities where your post would fit in. You can find suitable communities to join right here. Look through posts within a community that would be a good fit for your content. Search the tags on those posts to find the right tags for yours.
Speaking of communities, you'll get much better engagement on your posts if you join some communities. When you create new content, you'll want to add that content to an appropriate community for your content. For instance, if you're a photographer and you plan to post your images to Hive, you can join a community for photographers. Photography Lovers, Black and White, and Urban Exploration are three communities for photographers.
Writers, travelers, gamers, foodies, and musicians all have communities they can join to meet likeminded Hivers. People living in specific geographic areas, such as the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and Ghana also have communities.
Bottom line: join some communities and post your content to those communities to attract a following.
Engagement is paramount on Hive. You'll earn more rewards if you engage with others on the platform, but don't expect an algorithm to help you with that. You've got to be proactive in finding people with similar interests to yours so that you can interact with them and engage on their posts and yours.
Through the various front ends on Hive, creators have a variety of different types of content available to them. Hive.blog is designed for writers and bloggers. 3Speak is perfect for video content creators. Liketu is the place to go to post your memes and visual content.
The key to earning power on Hive is a quality and consistent posting schedule. Whether you create text-based content, videos, photography, or something else, you want to be consistent and produce the highest quality content you can produce. The more often you post, the more likely you'll gain a following, but you don't have to post daily if that isn't manageable for you. Some Hivers post multiple times a day. Others post once a week. Figure out how much time you have to post and post as often as you can given your time availability.
But don't sacrifice quantity for quality. Hivers do expect content creators to give their best. That means no plagiarism, no spam, and no illegal or questionable content. This kind of content will only attract downvoting bots like Hivewatchers and will earn you a negative reputation.
In short, be consistent with your posting and produce the highest quality posts you can create. Be positive and give it time. Rome wasn't built in a day and your Hive content business won't be either.
Hive was built for creators and curators. If you create content of any kind, then you're a creator. Curators are those Hivers who look for and find great content to upvote, share, and comment on.
Since Hive is a social media platform, you should spend a fair amount of time looking for quality posts to curate. Your Hive profile includes several areas you should familiarize yourself with. On the top menu, just below your profile header, you'll see Blog, Posts, Replies, Social, and Notifications. You'll check Notifications to see who has replied to your comments while the Social tab lists the communities you've joined. Replies shows a list of replies to your comments and blog posts. Posts is where all of your posts are stored while Blog includes your posts and those you've reblogged from other Hivers. In essence, your Blog is where you curate quality content.
To find great content to curate (upvote and reblog), you have several options.
First, try the Trending feed. If it's trending, other Hivers have likely noticed it and see value in it. You could too.
Check your communities. If you've joined several communities, based on your interests, all you have to do is go to your Communities list and scour through the latest posts to find some quality posts to curate.
Another way to find quality posts to curate is with a notification service called Ginabot. Read this post to learn how to set up Ginabot in Discord.
If you want to curate more posts faster, you can join a curation trail, which allows you to curate posts found by others. These are somewhat controversial, and not everyone appreciates curation trails, but they can help you find quality content to curate at the expense of engagement. For that reason, I wouldn't rely on them solely for your curation efforts. You want to engage with high quality content regularly. But curation trails can increase your earnings.
To find curation trails, join Hive.vote and use it to follow the best curation trails on Hive.
Hive.vote is a useful tool. Not only can you follow curation trails, but you can also schedule your posts, claim your rewards, and follow other users whose content you would like to curate regularly. A new feature allows you to establish notifications.
To join curation trails, login to your Hive.vote account (using your Hive username and Hivesigner) and click on Curation Trail on the navigational menu on the left side of your screen. Scroll down to Popular Curation Trails and click the blue Follow button next to the curation trails you want to join. Be careful not to join too many. Every upvote you give to the content those trails lead you to lowers your Mana. The lower your Mana, the less you can do on the blockchain until your Mana increases again. I recommend setting a threshold below which your upvotes will cease until your Mana rises above that threshold again.
In my opinion, the best curation trails are @curie, @qurator, @ocd, @ecency, and @curangel. You may find others you'd like to join, but be sure to vet them so that you don't follow curation trails that tend to upvote trash posts. The ones I mentioned above have good reputations and curate the highest quality content. Some curation trails, like @actifit and @travelfeed, specialize in specific types of content.
Curation trails are meant to be an adjunct to your other curation practices. Don't substitute your own manual curation for automated curation, and I recommend pausing your curation trails periodically to allow your Mana to recharge.
Being a decentralize blockchain means that Hive is loaded with useful decentralized applications (dapps). These dapps allow you to manage your Hive experience more efficiently and effectively.
The Hive ecosystem consists of more than 125 dapps. From block explorers to decentralized finance dapps, you can use these special tools to make your Hive experience better and more profitable. To find useful dapps to enhance your Hive experience, go to https://hive.io/eco.
Here is a short list of the most popular dapps on the Hive blockchain:
@splinterlands is one of the most popular blockchain-based games in Web3
@peakd and @ecency are both very popular front ends you can use to post your content to the Hive blockchain. When you use Ecency, you earn Ecency Points. You can then use those points to boost your content to make it visible to Ecency's manual curators. If your post is chose for curation, you'll receive an upvote from an Ecency curator and curators who follow the Ecency curation trail will leave their own upvotes. This can be quite profitable for monetizing your content. Peakd has its own unique features including a chat feature.
CubFinance is a decentralized finance dapp that allows users to trade Hive and HBD on the Binance blockchain.
Hive Blocks and Hive Block Explorer are popular block explorers on the Hive blockchain.
DLux is a decentralized virtual reality platform connected to the Hive blockchain.
Waivio gives Hivers the ability to set up a storefront on the blockchain.
@actifit is a fitness dapp similar to Fitbit on the Hive blockchain.
3Speak is a tokenized video community.
Hive Tube is a decentralized YouTube alternative on the Hive blockchain and syndicated through the Fediverse.
@inleo is another Hive front end that also includes a microblogging component called threads. Ecency and D.buzz also have short-form content features.
As you can see, there is no shortage of useful Hive dapps. Everyone can find at least one dapp to use to increase their monetization efforts on the Hive blockchain.
So far, I've shared several ways to increase your Hive monetization efforts, but there is one way to enhance your Hive experience and create better monetization efforts for yourself that is far better than all the rest. On some blockchains, it's called staking. On Hive, it's called Powering Up. It's so important that every month Hivers participate in a Power Up Day to encourage users to power up their Hive and increase their own earning potential.
When you earn Hive rewards, they fall into two categories: Author Rewards and Curation Rewards. Both are paid out in liquid HIVE and/or Hive-Backed Dollars (HBD). From there, you can hold them on the platform as liquid assets, cash them out and take them off chain, or stake them to increase your earning potential. I recommend staking them, aka Powering Up.
Why is Powering Up important? For several reasons:
Number one, Powering Up your Hive increases your earning potential due to the inflationary aspect of the asset. Hive Power (HP), the staked version of liquid HIVE earns approximately 2.96% APY just by sitting in your wallet. The more HP you have, the more you'll earn.
Remember Mana? Called Resource Credits, these non-monetary units are depleted over time as you perform more actions on the blockchain. Increasing your HP increases your Mana, which means you have greater ability to create more content, curate more content, and perform actions on the blockchain that allow you to monetize. Very simply, more HP increases your earning power by increasing your Mana.
Every time you earn new rewards on the blockchain, you should Power Up those rewards so that you can increase your Mana and take advantage of the HP inflationary feature. But you can do more than that!
If you purchase HIVE on an exchange and transfer it into your Hive account, you can Power Up that HIVE to increase your Hive Power. If you Dollar Cost Average your purchases, you can increase your HP significantly over time. For instance, with a minimal investment of $25 per month, you can increase your HP by $300 a year while increasing your Mana and taking advantage of Hive Power's inflationary feature. I call it a fast track because it will get you closer to becoming a top Hive earner much faster than relying on the rewards system alone. The more you buy and Power Up, the more earning potential you have.
Both CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko list where you can purchase HIVE if you're ready for dollar cost averaging.
The Hive blockchain is more than just a blockchain. Hive.blog is more than just a social media platform. By combining traditional social media applications with decentralized finance features, content creators and curators of all types have the ability to take monetization into their own hands and earning more from their content without an intermediary platform that takes more of creator earnings than the creators themselves. This is the beauty of Hive!
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