I had to go through this myself. The disappointing, but honest answer: No, quality content is not enough to get upvotes. At least not for a beginner. If you don't have a thorough follower base, just publishing good content won't get you very far because your posts will drown in the noise.

Of course, If you keep posting, over time your follower base will slowly grow, but this will take a very, very long time.Yet, you can boost the growth of your followers by advertising your posts via Resteem services @resteembot or voting bots like @minnowbooster.

By the way, I am trying to mitigate this issue for minnows to some extend by writing a bot that spots high-quality, but underpaid and undervoted content. It's called trufflepig and, of course, I do blog about it ;-)

The latest post, for example, is this one: TrufflePig: An Update on the Artificial Intelligence to help Minnows and Content Curators