A review of @steempress (and why you should be using it!)

December 2, 2018 revisesociology 573 Comments

@SteemPress is plugin you can install on your WordPress blog which allows two-way integration between WordPress and Steem: it allows you to publish your WordPress posts to the Steem blockchain and to view your Steem post upvotes, earnings and comments on your WordPress blog.

It works with both WordPress.org blogs and WordPress.com blogs, although you’ll need a pro subscription for the later.

The vision of SteemPress is to empower all WordPress bloggers to be able to benefit from the potential earnings and wider audience which are both available on the Steem blockchain

SteemPress was developed and is maintained by two very talented individuals: @fredrikaa and @howo, who both left well paid professional jobs so they could commit to the project full time. I’ve been using it for several months on both my .org and .com WordPress blogs and it’s a great plugin which works very well, and is constantly being improved.

The advantages of using SteemPress

WordPress is more efficient and functional than steemit and other pure steem blogging UIs

As much as I appreciate the work being done on UIs such as busy.org and steempeak, I can’t help but think they are just ‘reinventing the wheel’. WP is (as far as I’m aware) open source, with shed loads of available plug-ins which make it multi-functional, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m going to use it whenever possible!

In case you’ve never seen the back-end of WordPress.org – here’s a screen capture: you can see that it’s about as close to a Word Processor as you’re going to get.

In fairness, busy.org does come pretty close to this, but with WP I have the following further advantages over using dedicated steem interfaces ATM:

I can modify the content after 7 days, at least on the WP end.
I’m much more able to weaponise my SEO on WP thanks to slugs, a wider range of image tag options, categories and feature images. There are also SEO plugins to help.
I can set up pages with links to organise my best blog posts.
I have multiple blog layout options – again in fairness to SteamPeak, it has two layout options, but WP has many.
All of the other plugins! I can do so much: embed polls (easily), have my twitter feed displayed at the side, show my most popular posts, even set up a shop!

SteemPress helps established WP users leverage the advantages of the Steem blockchain….

The most ‘in your face’ leveraging advantage is that you can earn crypto from your WP blog posts as well as earning from WP advertising revenue. You might also get quite a nice upvote from the @steempress account, which has 1M SP, and there’s not a lot of accounts out there that have that kind of fire power!

You could also get more engagement by cross-posting to Steem. Despite having 500K hits a month on my WP.com blog, I actually get more engagement in the form of comments and likes on steemit, and so this looks good when the Steem comments are embedded at the end of every WP post.

Having at least the ‘first draft’ of your work locked into an immutable chain offers some kind of advantage in terms of proving initial authorship beyond dispute.

Of course integrating the two accounts also means you might also attract more users to steem via WP, which is in all of our long term financial interests.

Using SteemPress helps promote Steem and potentially helps with Steem onboarding….

One of the main aims of SteemPress is to promote the best of Steem on WordPress in order to get more people using Steem. If WP bloggers with an established audience start using SteemPress, then every blog post becomes an advert for Steem. Two way integration means that anyone reading a WP post will see the upvotes, payouts and comments and this may peak their interest in joining.

In order for this to be most effective, I’ve designed a little bespoke footer to ‘sell’ Steem to people (see below), and I’m anticipating the journey from ad to onboard to become even more seamless in 2019 once the @steemonboarding project kicks off.

Your content is more secure with WordPress/ SteemPress

@Ned floated the possibility of steemit disappearing in the recent Steeminc livestream, which raised all sorts of concerns of storage of content and SEO. Well, if you’re blogging to steemit/ Steem via WP, this is not a problem.

@SteemPress might also be part of the greater decentralisation plan moving forwards, given that data is already self-hosted on WP blogs there might be scope to not store this data on the blockchain, just somehow integrate voting and comment and reward functions without the data storage functions.

A couple of downsides with using SteemPress

You need to pay for the hosting of a WP blog, but the fee is fairly minimal, something in the region of £10 all in per month, personally I do this via GoDaddy.

Cross posting may hurt your SEO, but there is a time delay function with SteemPress, and if you delay cross posting by seven days then apparently this is sufficient to nullify any effects here. Or you can set up an alternative WP blog if you already have one that’s up and running and has good SEO you want to protect.

Final thoughts/ SteemPress links

SteemPress is one of the best applications on steemit, if you’ve already got a WordPress blog I recommend integrating it. If you don’t have a WordPress blog, I recommend setting one up and integrating SteemPress with it.

To download SteemPress, you’ll find the plug-in at https://wordpress.org/plugins/steempress/

The latest updates are available at the SteemPress discord channel!

To vote for their witness, either use SteemConnect following this link, or at https://steemit.com/~witnesses.

If you don’t already have a WP,org blog, I recommend setting one up via GoDaddy. There may be other providers, but this has worked well for me. Good service, reasonable price!

SICK OF MAINSTREAM SOCIAL MEDIA, THEN WHY NOT SIGN UP WITH STEEM?

This post is also being published to the steem network, which pays you in cryptocurrency (steem) for blogging, vlogging, commenting on, and even just upvoting other people’s content.

If you are a blogger, vlogger, entrepeneur or developer, or even if you just like good content, you should get on steem: it’s social media 4.0!

Even though steem only went live in 2016, it has already evolved into a thriving and diverse, decentralised network, and there are a number of ways you can start earning from your content on steem: