I just joined Steemit for 7 days and in the past few days, I was thinking about tags. The more I think about it, the better I understand how to use it.

First, I go to the page https://steemit.com/tags/trending and find the most popular tasks. Here are the top 15 tags by total payouts

Topic	Posts	Comments	Payouts
life	44538	26987	4,282,923.778 SBD
steemit	29593	38729	4,139,339.177 SBD
steem	10509	8061	2,738,652.306 SBD
photography	31248	39207	2,085,715.682 SBD
art	18307	19021	1,412,865.480 SBD
introduceyourself	4768	27358	1,378,694.526 SBD
travel	12388	17040	1,293,850.543 SBD
blog	17584	4074	1,285,793.474 SBD
writing	8996	3624	1,192,207.896 SBD
bitcoin	15605	19403	1,156,949.991 SBD
story	10727	3422	1,084,181.999 SBD
cryptocurrency	9979	10126	843,160.709 SBD
money	9915	4649	826,005.380 SBD
kr	5351	39201	818,618.916 SBD
food	7509	14174	773,898.868 SBD

At first, I wondered “will the popular tags help me to earn more votes? “. As you know the rule is “The more people who see your posts, the more likely they’ll vote up your post”

And the dilemma is: “In the most popular topics, there could be hundreds of posts being made per minute because everyone wants to use these tags. The more posts coming out, the faster yours will get buried underneath all the new ones.”

Another point “You should focus on the average payouts for a post rather than the total payouts” Here are top 16 less competitive tags with the highest AVERAGE payouts :

Post	Posts	Comments	Average payout
msp3k	3	696	104
charlesfuchs	15	915	221
comment	62	535	92
gridcoin	73	515	358
beachwednesday	74	705	87
witness-category	91	875	1097
steemfest	130	475	907
whaleshares	193	552	352
sbd	193	389	156
openmic	195	1810	246
parenting	277	293	195
minnowsupportproject	287	1305	164
bitshares	306	1837	1071
beer	323	551	98
poloniex	344	343	284
eos	357	1303	269

After doing the research, I realize the importance of niche tags. Here are some tips:

Remember “Content is king”
Make sure your tags stay relevant to the content
Diversify your exposure on multiple channels. People follow the topics “steemit” are highly likely to follow “steem”. Don’t include both tags.
Be creative and find the potential niche tags with less competition. If your story gets on the “trending” page of that category, it will stay trending for a couple days.

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