I am doing Steem full time now as a witness which includes my work as an author, curator, video producer, advertiser, etc! From December 2014 to August 2017, I was spending most of my time creating, filming, producing, and selling video courses online. A month ago, I became frustrated with my inability to both give everything to Steem and my video courses. I realized I either needed to drop Steem to go back to focusing on filming courses or go all in on Steem. With the generosity of the upvotes on my posts and my witness, I have taken the leap of faith to stop filming video courses and do Steem full time!

I work about 6 hours a day seven days a week from about 8:30 am to about 2:30 pm in Florida, USA which is on EST or EDT depending on the time of year. Around 90% of that time is now devoted to my service on Steem and related activities such as uploading free tutorial videos to YouTube which reference Steem. Most of what I do involves making posts, research, reading comments, replying to comments, checking discord chat, managing advertising campaigns on Facebook and YouTube for our Steem video ads, and filming videos which consistently find a way to mention Steem.

With the change to doing Steem full time, I now consider you that are reading this, upvoting my posts, and upvoting me as a witness at https://steemit.com/~witnesses as my boss or manager because you are a part of paying my now full time salary in Steem. Given that I am working for you, it is my responsibility to provide you with an activity log once of week summarizing what I have done quickly in a way you can easily review.

Review of Full Time Service as a Steem Witness!

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September 13, 2017 to September 20, 2017. All links are posts on Steemit.

1. Continued education aimed at increasing witness voting participation in Our Top 20 Witnesses Earn 250 Steem Power A Day and Meet Steem's Top 20 Witnesses.
2. Prepared a complete investor pitch post in Top 10 Reasons to Buy and Hold Steem in response to questions asking for advice on how to explain the value of Steem to friends.
3. Added to existing discussion about curation rewards in The HF19 Maximum Curation Rewards Strategy with a look at the current power of autovoting and a hope we can find a solution that provides greater rewards for manual curation.
4. Launched a video ad for Steem in Steem Video Ad #4 for Facebook and YouTube featuring my latest price prediction video which takes more of a gentle approach pitching Steem in a popular format that has reached over 100,000 viewers for free on YouTube in the last two videos of this type.
5. Paid out a total of $240 SBD to newer authors and curators helping find the most undervalued new Steem posts in Out of Clever Titles for Upvotable #33 and Our Curation Teams Rock in Upvotable #34.
6. Started my first contest $100 Graphic Design Contest: Make My First Header offering graphic designers a chance to win $100 SBD to make me a cover image.
7. Made my third attempt in Cryptocurrency Price Predictions for October 2017 to bring a lot of Google users learning about cryptocurrencies to Steem with the previous two posts like this having brought over 50,000 views to Steemit mostly from Google organic search traffic as explained in 1,000+ Views a Day from Google to Steem: Witness Update #3
8. Shared a tutorial showing what I use to do my accounting in QuickBooks Self Employed Review and Tutorial.
9. Posted regular updates to my Happier People inspirational blog series with Cheapest Way to Feel Rich? and What Makes Me Feel Most Vulnerable? #167 and Why Grow Grass and Buy Food? #168
10. Tested a travel post format in Residence Inn Marriott in Nashville SE/Murfreesboro, Tennessee
11. Discovered 16 Steem users with $63,278.28 in Steem, Steem Power, and SBD at risk because of compromised private keys in memos. I contacted each of these users in the comments urging an immediate password change and will make a post about this tomorrow to give each user time to make the change in addition to asking Steemit to make a UI update that blocks transmitting private keys in memos. I believe I have seen this request made before and I will make it again until it is done.
12. Paid the invoice to @privex for my Steem witness, seed, and backup server for three months in advance to help ensure I do not miss an invoice and have my witness drop offline because of failure to pay! All of my servers have the specs listed below with the backup on a different continent than the witness and seed.
13. Returned from evacuating hurricane Irma without missing a day on Steemit!
14. Bought $8,000+ more Steem with the price drop including mostly funds from my wife @laurabanfield who withdrew a big part of her savings from the bank and is putting it into Steem Power!
15. Submitted new Steem ads to Facebook and YouTube along with analyzing results from previous campaigns and planning new ads to improve on existing results.

Witness Servers!

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I have a witness, seed, and backup server all with the following specifications.

64GB DDR4 RAM
2x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V3
2x 240GB SSDs
1Gbit/s connection

The witness and seed have been online for more than two months with thankfully just one missed block! With gratitude for huge witness upvotes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses in the last month from @clayop and @pumpkin along with reaching over 1000 votes total for my witness, I invested in renting a backup server and will be getting it online soon with automatic failover setup to ensure I am prepared to act as a top 20 witness at any moment.

Here are my current parameters.

Projects In Progress!

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Read this to get a preview of what will be coming out in the next week or two!

1. SteemJ! After speaking with @sarasate and taking a lot of time thinking about how to best bring the values desired in SteemJ to life, I realized that what we really need is to just build a peer to peer USD exchange with no fees and the ability to post jobs into existing apps instead of competing. I will soon do a post requesting the features from SteemJ to be built into eSteem, ChainBB, and/or busy.org along with also an ask for a bounty to be paid by Steemit in the crowdfunding marketing protocol for finishing these new feature updates because while adding a SBD to fiat exchange with no fees and the ability to post jobs should add a lot of value for Steem users, these updates in the foreseeable future are unlikely to generate much revenue for the developers of these apps!
2. Meetups! As I have been struggling to plan the next meetups, I received an amazing idea to just do a regular meetup once a week at a university. I am currently working one university at a time to see if I can book a room to host a weekly Steem meetup near Tampa, Florida. Once I have this done, I will show exactly the steps I took to make it happen and make a system for anyone to duplicate these efforts in another location along with making a request to Steemit to make a landing page or location where anyone could immediately find every local Steem meetup.
3. Backup and Witness Setup Video Tutorial! In setting up my backup witness, I am planning to film everything and put a full length tutorial out on YouTube showing every single step needed to setup a Steem witness for use by new witnesses which I hope will bring many technically skilled developers and Ubuntu Linux server managers to Steem over the next year or two.
4. Data! I am planning to learn how to directly pull my own data from the Steem blockchain and make custom reports similar to what @lukestokes does with his updates about the voting power participation. Wait until you see some of the data I show when I learn how to actually gather it :)

Witness Votes!

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Who is voting for my witness? https://steemdb.com/@jerrybanfield/witness

Who am I voting for as a witness today? https://steemdb.com/@jerrybanfield/witness

I update my witness votes almost every day to help ensure my votes are going for witnesses I see contributing the most to maintain and grow Steem because I ask readers in almost every post to set me as a proxy as the easy way to participate in the witness voting process. I am very grateful for witness votes from @pumpkin who is proxied by @freedom who is the largest single Steem Power holder outside of the official @steemit account along with @clayop, @roadscape, and @klye who are top 20 witnesses along with @teamsteem who was one of the very first to vote for me as a witness and help me get my first block.

For getting witness votes, updates like this and posts adding significant value to Steem appear to be the most effective method of helping witness voters with a lot of Steem Power discover us and make upvotes for our witnesses.

Thank You for Reading!

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I appreciate the chance to be of service to our community here full time and will begin writing my next post immediately after publishing this one!

Love,
Jerry Banfield

Shared on

• Facebook page with 2,252,594 likes.
• Twitter to 105,304 followers.

PS: Witness votes are the most important votes we make on Steem because one vote for a witness lasts indefinitely! Would you please make a vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because when we make our votes, we feel in control of our future together? Thank you to the 1012 accounts voting for me as a witness, the 237M VESTS assigned from users trusting me to make all witness votes by setting me as proxy, and @followbtcnews for making these .gif images!

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