Thanks for joining @thehalfrepper I am glad you got to take part.  In my opinion, the best way for a newbie that joins this contest there are three ways to grow well organically: 3.) join the contest and take advantage of the upvotes and other daily prizes that come your way.  2.) Win the contest, which unfortunately with scores of deserving recipients, and with me even jumping the payout to two winners in this one, there is a low percentage that realize that victory 1.)  Then there is joining the curation trail.  Why is this so important?  This is where I do my voting.  I vote on a post, and those on steemauto vote with me.  I vote for those that are on the curation trail.  I encourage you to post once daily, and you will get the upvote from all that are on the trail.  So quite often you will post, and within 30 minutes you will 5,6,7 upvotes that are at the moment worth 0.05-0.07sbd.  While a steembasicincome membership is very nice, beginners on there start with 0.02-0.04 based on their posting patterns.  I am saying the curation trial I am running is a very shrunken down version of steembasicincome in some ways.  It's up to you, take advantage if you'd like, there is a lot of upside in having that nice cushion to post once daily and get started off organically in the right direction.  Feel free to message me back or reach me on discord (link shown when you click my user icon).  Thanks again for participating, and best of luck!