You live for your photography, you love taking photographs, and love sharing them to your audience on social media. Carefully you’ve built up your loyal following on the different social media, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter,…

You’ve been plowing through your engagement stats to find the most perfect time to post, so carefully you prepare your latest post, your baby, the best picture you took in the last few days.

You hit the “publish” button, and yes! Your newest post is live! The crowd loves it! The views, likes and loves are flowing in! And the social media? They thank you! And from the bottom of their heart! Because your work, your popularity, your traffic, is earning them millions and millions of dollars!

Every like counts

Every like you get, every post you make, every view you get, or every view you make on social media, is generating money. For the social media companies, for the Meta’s, the Tiktoks, the Twitters, the Snapchats. Not for you. Unless you are one of the very few lucky ones.

What if… If only… there was a way to give back to the creators? Or even better, share the pie amongst the creators. And well, why not also amongst the audience, the likers, the curators, the ones that see the great work?

And what if that pie doesn’t shrink, but only becomes larger when more people get their share?

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Biker in the mist

Let me introduce you to decentralized social media, or social media on blockchain!

There’s more than one of course, but in this article, we’ll discuss Hive, one of the most popular blockchain social media at the moment, and with a large and lively photography community.

Hive lets you create content, in different forms, formats and frontends, and earn cryptocurrency with that content. Every like, or “upvote”, your content receives, earns you some Hive, or HBD (Hive Backed Dollar). And to make things even better, every upvote you give to the content of another creator, potentially earns you Hive and HBD as well! It’s not just a win-win situation, it’s a can’t lose situation!

And to make things even better: your content is, and stays, your own! It’s written in the blockchain, that this post and that comment is yours. Not owned by Facebook, not by Google, no Instragam, no Tiktok. Only yours. So that’s where the earnings should go!

How to create a Hive account

Step 1 – Register your account

You can access the Hive blockchain via different interfaces, such as Ecency and Peakd, but for the best user experience while creating your account, I recommend you to use Peakd for now.

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PeakD – Join

Here’s what you need to do to create a Hive account:

  • Pick a Username
  • Agree to the Terms of Service
  • Download a Backup for your Private Keys (Very Important! Your account is LOST without these keys!)
  • Enter your Phone Number

After you register your account, log in by clicking on the top-right corner of the website. Then click on Hivesigner -> Import Account. Afterward, type in your username and copy the required key from your downloaded backup. Finally, paste it into section labeled “Master password or private key.”

Once you’ve register your account, you upload a profile and background picture (go to Account settings -> Edit Account Profile). You can also add personal information such as location and website, and anything else you want to share about yourself.

Step 2 – Start Posting

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You can create your first post by clicking on the pencil in the top right corner!

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Creating a new post on PeakD

  1. Write a new post in My Blog or any of the Communities you’ve joined (Step 3).
  2. Title your post.
  3. Give a short or long description.
  4. Select topics (tags).

In addition to choosing a Topic for your post, you can click on ADVANCED to further personalize your content or the payout of your post’s rewards, but you’ll learn more about that later on.

After you create your post, you can publish it at once or schedule it to be published on a specific day and time, which is one of the nice advantages of PeakD.

Step 3 – Joining Communities

Hive is a social medium, and it is all about that interaction, and community feeling. It’s not just a showcasing platform. So now is the time to join your favorite communities and start posting!

Since this guide is specifically for photographers, I will list the most popular photography communities:

Many of these communities also offer great contests and curations, often increasing your chances of visibility, earning and winning!

Note: these are only some of the photography related communities, the Hive ecosystem is very very broad, and there are communities on many topics!

Step 4 – Your Rewards & Your Wallet

You can find your wallet under Profile – Others – Wallet

The Hive earning and wallet system are very extensive, but to keep it short:

Once you have created a post, people can vote for it. The value of each vote depends on the amount of HP (HIVE POWER) that each voter has powered up in their wallet. The more HP a voter has, the more worth his vote CAN have.
The value in the lower right corner of your post shows you how much HBD (Hive Backed Dollar) will be evenly split between the curators (the voters) and the creator (in this case: you!).
You will receive your payouts in your wallet after a period of 7 days, where you then can “Collect Rewards”.
At this time, you are ready to start your journey on the Hive decentralized social media on the blockchain! And I’m pretty sure you will still have plenty of questions. You can start reading the FAQ of PeakD, or you can ask your question below.

Earn on autopilot

When all this is not yet enough for you, and you want to increase your earnings even further, there’s even more options!

  • It wouldn’t be a social media platform, if there weren’t any bots. But on Hive, you can put these bots to good use! You can use hive.vote for instance, to auto-like the posts of people you admire on Hive. That way you support them for the posts, and you get to reap some curator rewards as well!
  • You can put part of your Hive and/or Hive Power into your savings, earning a 20% APR on it. The downside? Hive and HP that is in your savings account, can’t be used as Hive Power, and thus will not earn you in your curating votes. The best thing is to find a middle ground between the two.
  • Not totally on autopilot, but almost: Ecency has a mobile app as well, which means you can create posts and vote on Hive nearly everywhere you go, while waiting on the bus, sitting on the toilet, standing on the escalator…
  • As said, the Hive ecosystem is huge! And it has many different platforms on it, one of them being Actifit, which rewards you in Hive payouts for your steps (see Moving can earn you cryptocurrencies for more info). Not really without effort, but still something that you do pretty much everyday anyway.
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Conclusion

The Hive decentralized social media on blockchain is a very extended ecosystem where you own your content, and offers quite a lot of possibilities for photographers, where you earn for every like you get.

Will it get you rich? No, not immediately, not without effort, not just like that. But it can bring you in some nice extra’s, which would otherwise only make big tech companies even richer. And since it doesn’t cost you to get started, why not give it a try?

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