I have learned a lot over my stay so far on Steemit. But the most important aspect of Steemit that is unique to the platform is the curation system.

I have been scammed many times on the cryptocurrency world. I usually look at an ICO thread on bitcointalk, and invest blatantly, thinking that I would make a profit.

Most of the times, I was dead wrong.

I'd estimate my losses around $2,000 making bad investment, and lending choices on the cryptocurrency platforms alone. This is a big sum for me. And I was going to lose more.

Then, I found Steemit.

With Steemit, I quickly realised that posting was not the only thing you can do to profit from the platform. In fact, most whales on Steemit only curate, and rarely post.

This is just like in real life, where people invest instead of doing manual labour.

Steempower in this instance is your investment capital, so the more you hold, the more you are going to get when you successfully curate. And the rewards, in the form on more SP, can be thought as interest/returns on your investment.

This corresponds with IRL situations as well. The more you invest, the more you get.

However, there are several things that you have to do to get a decent curation reward.

Vote early. You cannot vote a post which already has over $20k in revenue, and still expect a worthwhile curation reward.
Vote smart. Vote original content that has the potential to succeed.
Vote quick. Get in there before whales do, the difference between a 1 SP curation reward and a 0.01 SP curation reward could be seconds.

I have learned, over time how to become a better investor, solely from my experience on Steemit. Here I will summarize 3 golden rules that YOU need to know to become a successful investor.

-Buy the rumor, sell the news.

Get in the market when nobody else even knows that there is such a market. This is one of the most common knowledges between investors. When nobody knows about it, obviously it's going to be dirt cheap to invest. But when it becomes a "news", i.e. everyone already knows about it, and it cannot really go up any further than it currently is, get out of the market.

Invest early, and go against the general trend of the public. When people are buying because of a hype/bubble, it is probably good to get out as soon as you can.

-Do the research.

Before you invest in anything, ask yourself 3 questions.

-Is this idea original and creative?
-Is the public going to embrace this idea and adopt this technology/company?
-Is this company's business model sustainable?

That way, you are eliminating 99% of the risk of the investment going bad.

-Grab the opportunity, quick.

Do it before anybody else does. This corresponds to the first point, "buy the rumour, sell the news". Use other investors after you as a resource. They are buying the investment that you are holding, whether it is an altcoin or a share of a company. If you don't get in there quick, you'll become the resource of others.

Steemit has taught me lots. It is not just a plain old social media site.

It has taught me how to catch the eye of the public, it has taught me how to market myself, most importantly, it has taught me how to manage my money better, and make it grow.

I have bought STEEM when it was dirt cheap, at around 0.0005 BTC each. And I sold them at around the peak, at 0.005 each. Now that it has gone down a bit again, I have again gone back into STEEM, for the long term.

I hope that you have learned something today from my post. I appreciate you taking time reading it.