As a minnow who is now close to 1000SP without investing real money on Steem, I highly suggest doing BOTH.
What I did was join some Communities that support content creators like Qurator, Jumbot, Make-a-Whale, SilverGoldBotty, SteemPh.Cebu all the while somewhat supporting them back by delegating some of my Steem Power to them.
The moment I reached 200SP, I delegated half of that to Qurator and at that point was receiving daily guaranteed upvotes from them to support my blog posts which used to be earning only less than $0.2. I then use the other half to give a full upvote to people who keep on engaging with my contents. It might only give them less than $0.01 at that time, but believe it or not it's the thought that matters. We all start small and giving an upvote at 100% sends in a signal to that author that we appreciate their work and if we could only give more, we would. You just cannot support others without supporting yourself first.
As for the curation trails, I strongly discourage you to follow one at this point. From personal experience, no one really bothers to look the account of those trailers. It would be much better to just give a full vote to someone you deemed worthy even if it's just a measly $0.01.