After some consideration I have decided to put forward my witness application to both help support the Steem blockchain and raise funds for the projects I am working on.

The Witness Role Explained

For anyone who does not know, witnesses are a sort of elected group of people that are responsible for ensuring the Steem block chain runs as smoothly as possible. Every 3 seconds a new block is produced for the blockchain and the witnesses are responsible for providing the reliable hardware to be able to produce these blocks on time and keep the entire Steem ecosystem running.

Witnesses also need to maintain a price feed and are responsible for ensuring certain parameters are set that reflect the cost of account creation on Steem platforms, along with how much interest to pay on SDBs.

Essentially, without the witnesses the Steem blockchain would not function as well as it does today and would not support the massive growth Steem and Steemit is going through.

My Application

I am @adamm, I am an experienced marketer currently running a digital marketing agency in the UK, where I also manage a team of developers. Furthermore, I have experience in both IT and networking. I feel this experience and knowledge puts me in a unique position to be able to run a witness node and use the funds to support the growth of Steemit.

My Plans

The main purpose for my witness application is to initially fund the growth of user applications to Steemit in the UK. This is something I can manage and contribute to right now with my current responsibilities and my location.

The following are the projects I am already involved in:

Posting on Steemit daily, helping to curate, resteem and produce content needed to help grow the platform.
Assisting the @steemcleaners work to help keep the Steem blockchain free of content. With my experience in search engine penalty recovery I am more than able to create processes to semi-automatically discover and eliminate spam content. I have spoken to @anyx briefly on steemit.chat and whilst I am looking at processes to help for now, I am also using them myself to then post in the @steemcleaners-public channel.
Helping with the marketing side of @Steemsports. As of this moment the new website is being built and I am using my technical marketing skills to ensure the website structure correct for both organic and conversion purposes. In the near future I will take on a heavier role on Steemsports, which @thecryptodrive will be announcing in the coming days/weeks.
Assisting with #promo-uk, which is a marketing initiative launched this year by @stephenkendal. The initiative has only been running for a few months, however the response has been phenomenal. I am hoping that by applying my business and marketing experience into #promo-uk we can increase the results. I will be discussing the separately and in more detail below.

Plans to fund Steemit Growth in the UK

The main value I can add to promo-uk is my digital marketing agency experience. I am well experienced in creating and running a team of people of several skill sets to achieve a specific marketing goal.

At promo-uk, @stephenkendal is already crowd-sourcing a team of people with a wide range of skills, from marketing and development to those who’re able to distribute the print material throughout the UK. I intend to assist by utilising my digital marketing skills and knowledge of relevant tools to help track the progress of each campaign we run. I will also create a central area for the team to coordinate projects and monitor progress. Here is a brief overview of my initial plans:

Create a discord/basecamp or trello dashboard for the promo-uk team to communicate and distribute work that is planned in.
To find a solution to track the number of sign-ups promo-uk is producing and report on real world figures.
To help Stephen with his already successful leaflet distribution plans that are underway.
Produce a 12 month strategy to help grow steemit in the UK through digital marketing channels. This will include organic reach, digital PR and paid advertising.

Producing Results

Having run a marketing agency I’ve learnt how important it is to show transparency for the work produced. Once the initiative is fully up and running and my witness node is providing funds to support paid advertising etc. I will produce a monthly report to show all work that has been completed each month and what affect it has had to the bottom line of whatever the main point of tracking will be. I hope we can track everything down to user growth, however, I need to look into this before it is confirmed.

Longer Term plans

These are my longer terms plans as a witness (if I am able to receive funds as a higher rank witness):

I will look at extending marketing support to other countries where possible.
By this point the promo-uk initiative will have a lot of people and skills to make a huge impact. I intend to see if there is a way of speaking to and dealing with Steemit Inc directly. If they can pass their goals directly to promo-uk, this would be incredibly beneficial for Steemit’s global growth and would enable us to be more coordinated. The best case scenario would be to get Google Analytics access to fully analyse and track growth the marketing initiative is producing.
I will continue to provide everything I can for marketing the Steemsports platform.

It is likely these long term goals will change in time as the Steem blockchain evolves. As such I will provide regular witness updates to ensure everyone who has voted for me is updated.

My Witness Server

For anybody interested, these are the specs of my server. Keep in mind that if/when my witness rank increases and I am responsible for producing more blocks, I will upgrade as and when necessary to ensure it keeps up with demand.

VPS
Processor: Intel Xeon E3 4 cores.
RAM: 16GB DDR3.
HDD: 200GB.
OS: Ubuntu 16.04.
Server located in Germany.

My witness settings are:

Creation fee at 0.2.
Max block size of 131072.
0% APR currently since the SBD value is high.

These settings are likely to change. Should any changes happen I will report this in a witness update. In the future, if I do rank highly as a witness I will also look into running a seed node also.

Why Should you Vote for me?

There are so many incredible witnesses that have supported the blockchain thus far. I want to give a few reasons as to why you should vote for me as a new witness. This will also summarise the points above.

I am actively supporting the user growth of Steemit in the UK. Voting for me gives me funding to put towards this and to expand in other locations.
I am helping other platforms such as Steemsports. Voting for me will give me funds to direct more attention toward the Steem blockchain as a whole and focus my expertise on where it is needed.
I am helping @steemcleaners keep Steemit tidy. Whilst this is the area I have put the least time into, I would like to increase this so I can build my own tools to detect spam content and report it to be eliminated by the core @steemcleaners team.
Despite my plans listed above, it is important I make running the witness node a priority. Whilst I am not a full time developer, I know more than enough to set up and run a witness node and have access to developers that can assist me in supporting the node to ensure it runs as smoothly as possible. I am more than happy to dedicate my own funds to cover server costs and any developer costs, should I need it. The most important thing for me is to ensure the witness node runs with as few missed blocks as possible.

How to Vote for me

If you like what I am doing and supporting in the Steem and Steemit community, please consider voting for me @adamm as a witness.

Because I am currently outside of the top 50 witnesses, please vote for me in the following way:

Go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Scroll down to the bottom of the page until you see this text and box.
Please type in “adamm” and click “VOTE”.

Thank you for your time in considering my witness application and I hope you choose to vote for me and what I plan to accomplish.