Many of you have probably heard of upvote bots being used on Steemit. The concept is that people sell their votes to a 3rd party, and the 3rd party then uses the sellers' accounts to upvote a person who bought the vote. I think this is a really cool system because it's a win-win-win for the seller, 3rd party, and receiver.
One of the most popular voting bots out there is @minnowbooster. After using it for a few weeks, I found that there is 1 major flaw with minnowbooster, and that's the fact there are not enough high dollar votes. If you get on at the right time, you might get lucky and end up being able to get a vote worth more than .01 SBD. The big issue is that minnow booster ends up with almost no votes worth more than .01 SBD. Usually when I go to their website, https://www.minnowbooster.net/, I get a graph of possible upvotes that looks like this:
This is a real problem because if I want any vote worth over .01 SBD, I would have to send multiple .01 SBD transactions to @minnowbooster. I thought to myself "why not just send multiple votes instead of just one?" I did some research, and that's when I found @smartmarket. They do exactly what I was thinking. I can send 1 SBD to smartmarket, and I'll end up with multiple votes from multiple people. At the time of sending the transactions, you will almost always end up with a profit. I haven't ever sent SBD and not made a profit in the moment. Of course, if steem value declines significantly, you could end up in the negative. I will provide an example of this happening later.
What Can I Use SmartMarket For?
Make a profit buying votes
One of the things I plan to use smartmarket for is to make money online. I eventually hope to make enough money off of using smartmarket to be able to quit my part time restaurant job. I will show how profitable it can be in an example below.
Promote content
One thing people can use smartmarket for is to promote their content. Steemit is designed in a way that high valued posts tend to get seen most often. Someone could use smartmarket to boost the value of their post so that way, it can get seen by more people, and maybe it will get upvoted by more people too.
Make a profit selling votes
If you have a lot of steem power and you're not using every upvote possible, you are wasting your steem power. Why not use your steem power to make a little extra money? You can sell your votes to smartmarket using their website https://smartsteem.com/ to make a little extra Steem.
How Profitable is Buying Votes?
On one of my last posts, which can be found here, I used only smartmarket. At the time of sending all my SBD to smartmarket, the payout was at 8 SBD and 2.6 Steem, and I payed only 7.5 SBD. This meant I was netting .5 SBD and 2.6 Steem which was worth about $13 USD of profit right after using smartmarket. This meant I payed around $37.5 USD to get around $50 USD back. Not bad.
Earlier, I talked about how you may (highly unlikely) end up in the negative after using smartmarket. To show what I mean, I'll take a look at the same post. At the time of writing that post and using smartmarket, SBD and Steem had significantly higher prices. SBD went from 5 → 3.8 USD and Steem went from 4 → 3.41 USD. This brought my payout from 8 SBD and 2.6 Steem to 6.54 SBD and 1.96 Steem. This means now, I'm netting around $3 USD instead of $13 USD I orignally was netting. I still find this really impressive. Even after Steem lost 14% of its value, I'm still in the positive because of smartmarket.
How Does SmartMarket Work?
1. Send SBD to @smartmarket and put the post's url into the memo line.
As indicated in a recent post from @smartsteem found here, please wait 3-5 minutes before sending another upvote transaction. This is so that the bot doesn't accidentally skip over an upvote transaction.
2. Wait for upvotes. This is what it may look like afterwards.
I sent 1 SBD to @smartmarket for this post as seen above. After sending the 1 SBD to smartmarket, I recieved 6 upvotes worth 1.04 SBD and 0.31 Steem as shown in this image.
To get something even comprable to this with minnowbooster, I need to get on at just the right time, or send 100 small upvote transactions to minnowbooster! Sending that many transactions would be just absurd! This is why smartmarket is the most superior upvote bot around.
Now why did I get some SBD back?
One of the reasons may look like this. This means that they upvoted you with the highest value possible and that you should try again later to get higher upvotes. You can always see the maximum upvote by going here.
Another reason may look like this. This probably means that you are looking for too high of an upvote. To be safe, they sent all of it back instead of upvoting a small percentage of what you were looking for.
Can I get a higher upvote value?
Yes, you can. If you go to their website, https://smartsteem.com/ you can log in with Steem Connect and turn in an application to be whitelisted. The process will take a little while since they manually review each application. I'm currently in the process of hopefully landing on their white list. Whitelisted members are allowed to have higher upvote values. This picture from their website shows how high normal and whitelisted members can upvote in SBD. 
As shown in the image above, the white listed vote value is around double what a normal member can upvote. Sometimes, the whitelisted members can upvote a lot more than double a normal member. The image below shows an example of this where a whitelisted member can upvote near 60x what a normal member can upvote!
The value of each fluctuates frequently which is why you should go here before each upvote to see the maximum upvote.
This shows why smartmarket is the most impressive upvote bot in my opinion. I hope to use it for a long time throughout my endeavor on steemit. Please comment any questions you may have about @smartmarket. I will be glad to answer those to the best of my ability.
Thanks for reading!
-Logan
P.S. Smartmarket's sister account, @smartsteem, offers a bid based upvote bot. I will create a post about bid based upvote bots in the future. Smartsteem's bid based upvote bot is not featured in this post because it is not a lot different than all the other bid based upvote bots. I wanted to use this post to feature how impressive the smartmarket side of smartsteem is which is why I did not include their bid based upvote bot on this post too.
I'm so glad to find your article. Thank you for this! I'll recommend this article to the new folks I'm inviting into Steemit this week.
This is why I love selling my vote to them and using their service!
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 10 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 61 SBD worth and should receive 152 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigAhh, that's a great service indeed, different from the other upvote bots that we see every day! I hope your tactics to make money with this bot will work :) Doesn't seem like there's a lot of chance for fail...
Thanks
You're right about @smartmarket being a service worth investing.
I made a test transaction today, and I've already made a profit.
I'll be using this service a lot more in the future.
Big thanks to @therealwolf and everyone else who made this possible.
Does anyone know the on average the difference of return of selling your SP to minnow vs smart market? I'm currently using minnow bot and would like to reaccess options