For curation rewards, I recommend you to join a curation trail to start getting curation rewards until you learn how to do it by yourself.
Read a lot of articles from other authors. Look for authors that write good quality posts, receives decent rewards and post articles always at the same hour. Then upvote them 25-30 minutes after the post is published (12-15 minutes when the hardfork 20 is released)
Join The Curation and Engagement Leagues and compare your results with other users. It is also important to power up as much as possible, specially now that the Steem price is low.
For bounty rewards, visit https://steem-bounty.com/ to participate in all the bounties and use @dustsweeper to increase the value of the small upvotes received.
I tried @dustweeper but not sure how effective it is. I still see many posts where value was less than 0.002 and dustsweeper didn't make a contribution.
It will only do a maximum of 2 upvotes per day.