Nice guide! Personally, I feel this is completely subjective. When you enjoy an article, you just do.
I pay close attention to the people I follow. I do this using Steemstats, which offers notifications. But a Following feed is coming to Steemit in the next few days to make this more accessible.
I try to follow the "New" page as much as possible, but of course I miss a lot that way.
One thing that I don't consider a con is a lack of images. I have upvoted a couple of really good analysis / academia / fiction articles, which were unfortunately lost in the void. On such posts, adding images would be forced and undesirable.
There's also the rewards to consider, and how you can maximize them.
I get where you're coming from with forcing images into a post. I've noticed some people have had success with using an image as a signature. That way you're not changing the content, but you still will have an image in the listing. modprobe has done that for articles that he wrote which ended up becoming very popular:
https://steemit.com/anarchy/@modprobe/response-sorry-libertarian-anarchists-capitalism-requires-government
Yes, I've started doing that with my short story series. It is indeed effective. Went from 2-5 upvotes a chapter and getting totally lost to 60+ for the last chapter.
Quite so; I've found that using the signature image got me a lot more traffic, without compromising the mood of my post (or however you want to say that).