It may sound that easy, but if I check back on you in a month I'm sure your ideas will have changed (at least a little).
Optimism is awesome, Please remember Steemit doesn't like posts that are plagiarized or simply copy & paste (so saying just post whatever isn't really correct).
It is also not easy to get an audience or large rewards, most only get under $1.00 (but that is still $1.00 more than FB, they just just give us ads).
Also While you can take out the rewards, in fact it's better to leave your rewards in Steemit by Powerig up (or at least some portion of your rewards to benefit in the long term).
I would encourage users to at least keep some of the rewards in Steemit even though you can take them all out.
I see you are new here, so welcome, and good luck to you.
I took out some over time (Powered down) and invested in some BTC and other cybercurrencies too, and have still got some in steemit mostly Powered up
So you can cash out your rewards and send them to like Poloniex, for example, and trade for Bitcoin, etc? I woudl liek to keep Steem Power. I'll do like you did and do half and half.
Quick question: Suppose I invested 120 dollars in SBD and then sent it here to boost my Steem Power. Will that boost my reputation score and cause my upvote to go up and my content to be seen by more people? Thanks
And one more question. When I go around and upvote people, am I losing any of my Steem doing that? How does that work?
If you want to power up, you can invest in STEEM then power it up. If you invest in SBD it must first be changed into STEEM to power up.
You could set your rewards when you post to 50/50 that way you will get STEEM Power and SBD or you could set it for 100% STEEM Power in which case every reward you get will be powered up and increase your share of the vote pool, I'm not sure if it will increase your reputation too, I think that is only by posting and commenting.
If you want to take out rewards from Steemit, an easy way is blocktrades.us there's no need to sign up. Before you do that though, set up a wallet for the token you want to trade into (I use Exodus, it's easy to understand and has a few tokens, BTC, ETH, LTC, EOS, etc).
You also have the option of exchanges such as Bittrex etc if you want to use them, there have been problems with some of those though but if you want to trade then they are your only option, I just buy using blocktrades.us and hold in my exodus wallet. It's been scary lately.
I haven't tried to take real fiat money, that seems a lot more difficult and besides I want my mix of cyber currencies to grow over time so I'm HODL what I get.
I see you are talking about investing $ so I guess you have that part figured out.
Good luck to you.