I am seeing the accounts of my friends on Steemit and I realize that many don't use the compounding machine that Steem is. In this post I will go through some basics that everyone needs to understand and incorporate into to their Steem activity in order to get the most out of their accounts.
Steem Power You Need, Young Padavan!
The whole Steem ecosystem works with Steem Power (SP). The more SP you have the higher will be your upvotes. If you have a new account your upvote will be considered a dust-vote because it is so small that it looks like $0.00 but it is actually worth something outside of the visible scale. You can earn SP with your posts and comments as well as by upvoting and collecting curation rewards. On Steemit all posts reserve 25% of the payout for the curators (at least in theory, currently it is more complicated but that will get better with the next hardfork 20 or 21 - I will leave it at that for simplicity).
So, if you don't need to pay your bills with your earned rewards then there is only one thing you should do with them: Power them up. This means that you are vesting your Steem into the Steem ecosystem which transforms it into Steem Power, enabling you to all its benefits. You can do so directly from you Steemit wallet by clicking on Steem and select the Power Up function. You can also power up your Steem Blockchain Dollars (SBD) which you have earned but first you need to convert them into Steem. For that you can use the internal market or any exchange that supports SBD like Bittrex (Binance only supports Steem, not SBD).
Use Your Voting Power Daily
Another concept that is difficult to understand is your voting power and how that influences your upvotes and curation rewards. In order to balance the upvote system everyone has a voting power that depletes by 2% with each full upvote (you can make smaller upvotes on Steemit as soon as you hit 500 SP; other Steem-platforms allow you to do that without a minimum of SP). It takes 2.4 hours to recharge those 2% automatically. That means that you can upvote ten posts a day with your full power which consumes 20% voting power. Within 24 hours you have that back. Annoyingly, Steemit doesn't show you that voting power. But you can find it on Busy.org - which is an alternative Steem frontend - or on SteemWorld or SteemNow.
As soon as you hit 100% voting power your account sits idle and does not do anything. This should NEVER happen if you want to grow your account. You are basically loosing money during that idle time. In order to earn curation rewards effectively you must burn these 20% of voting power every day. If you are very active and if you love to discover new authors and posts without caring much about the amount of curation rewards you earn then doing this manually is the best choice for you.
Automize Your Upvotes With @SteemAuto
With the free service of SteemAuto I am able to manage all the people I want to support (currently over 50!) and get the vote in just at the right time. Because if you upvote a post before the 30 minute mark after publishing you will earn less. And if you come late and many others have already upvoted the post you will also get less. It is really complicated but basically what you need to know is that it is very beneficial to upvote a post at exactly 30 minutes. That way, you upvote it as early as you get the full curation rewards but still early enough to come before most of the manual voters.
To setup SteemAuto you need your private posting key and private active key to connect your account via the secure 3rd-party plugin SteemConnect. After you have enabled your account go to "Fanbase". Here you can follow any Steem account and make sure to upvote it automatically after a specific delay time. Set it to 30 minutes (other times are possible and it makes sense to micro-manage that for each user but that is already the pro-approach; For more about that check out this post). You can also limit the daily upvotes. I have most people on one upvote per day.
It requires some trial-and-error to figure out how much upvote weight you want to give to each user. A 100% upvote equals burning 2% of your voting power. A 50% upvote burns 1% voting power and so on. The smaller the weight, the more you can distribute your upvotes to various people. I use values between 5% and 100% for the people I upvote. You should observe your voting power during the following days and adjust your Steemauto settings if it drops below 80%. You should always aim to keep voting power equilibrium or you will burn too much and it will take too long to regenerate. Also, with lower voting power your upvotes will be worth accordingly less and hence your curation rewards will be lower as well.
Sell-Off Your Idle Time With @SmartSteem
Even with SteemAuto you can never really know if you avoid having an idle time at 100% voting power. Sometimes the service doesn't work and sometimes the people on your fanbase will be less active. To make sure that you are still using your voting power all the time and never let it go to waste you should use SmartSteem as well. This is another free 3rd-party app for Steem that requires your private keys via SteemConnect to activate. It will allow you to sell your votes to people who want to promote their posts by paying for it with Steem and SBD.
In general, I think selling your votes is a cool feature to make some money on the fly but not really beneficial for the Steem blockchain if everyone would do that all the time. However, in this method we are only selling any potential idle-time. Go to "Sell Your Votes" and enable that feature by authorizing your account on the bottom of the page. Then set the "Voting Power Threshold" to 99%. This way, you will always allow SmartSteem to sell your votes as soon as you hit 99% voting power and stop doing so when you drop below. This is merely a fallback-system and might never trigger if you support enough people with SteemAuto.
Congratulations! You have now a fully automated Steem account that will always support your favorite Steemians and use your voting power to its maximum. To me this is invaluable because I put focus on supporting people - NOT POSTS. So I don't care how great a single post of a person I follow is. They will always get the same upvote weight from me.
I still read most of the posts I upvote automatically but mostly much later after I already voted for them. And when I discover any kind of abuse or change in quality I can adjust or remove my voting behaviour quickly. Tell me what you think about this kind of approach.
I’m actually just switching from steemvoter to steemauto, which turns out to be superior in quite a few ways. Firstly they don’t use up one fullupvote from your account per day, like on steemvoter if you choose the “free version”. Further more you can set as many rules as you want with steemauto.
You can even make sure to set a limit on your voting power, for example on 80, and steemauto will automatically pause when it gets close to this level so you can get your power back and always stay above the limit you choose.
Frankly I don’t understand why people don’t use autovoting. It’s impossible to curate everything manually anyways, plus you are making full use of the potential earnings you can get from your daily refueled steem power
Yes, you are right. SteemAuto is free and has many cool features. It is also Open Source and I trust that much more. The developer @mahdiyari is pretty responsive on Discord and has added many features on request.
I think what I get from steemauto coming from all of this insight is that it serves as a well thought out trade-off deterrent. I get how that would help out especially because I feel the increasing power of one's steemit presence can surely intimidate them into thinking they'll add too much to a less significant post.
Interesting and helpful information. Thanks for sharing.
You are tremendously valuable to the newcomers of this community. Don't ever run out of steeeeemmm!
I try to keep it up. Has worked more or less well in the past year. ;)
This is excellent information @flauwy.
Just today I started using steemauto to give automatic support to the people I know are good users and constantly create good content (I just added you to my autovotes btw :P).
Don't you think the best time to autovote is at 29 minutes instead of 30 minutes?
Yes, I do think 29 minutes is better than 30 minutes IF you are getting high upvotes regularly but that is for the pros. Explaining that in this article would have just bloated it even more.
Thanks for adding me. I returned the favor. Your content is awesome and the post styling even more.
u have help me so much to make the most of my time here. now when the real life is "steeling" my time more inporten the ever. I can recommend @smartsteem has used it fore shome time helping me a lot.
just was on stem auto seams like a good app. ty.
It's like the only thing on Steem everyone uses that I haven't dove into yet - Steemauto
But I think this post pushed me over to the good side of the force lol
I try to manually curate the posts and blogs I enjoy and follow but there is so much stuff out there and only 24 hours in a day. Think that tool could help me use up my SP more :)
Appreciate the push sir!
I found it a bit intimidating because it says "if you don't know what you're doing, leave"
I finally did it anyway because until I do, I won't know how it works.
I'm a fan of it now.
@kennyskitchen posted about it
SteemAuto is not the first one: There is SteemVoter and Streemian. But SteemAuto is the youngest and the best. Forget those other twos again, it was just for your information. ;)
If you know who you want to support this will make it much easier AND you earn higher rewards pretty much guaranteed. Like I said, there is tons of micro-managing possible to tweak it for even higher returns. But this is the basic for everyone to make sure that your account is ALWAYS in use and grows your Steem Power (because you get curation rewards in SP).
Like I wrote above: I read most of the posts I autovote for. This is about optimizing the use of your voting power.
@steem-plus is a really cool browser extension from @stoodkev. I can suggest it to everybody. However, I use the Brave browser to block all trackers and ads and the addon is not supported here.
Steem power is something everyone should hold its the power which empowers you ;) thanks for sharing various methods here
Imagine if everyone in the world want to have Steem Power. There is just a quarter billion Steem available in total. :)
even if half of the world population for instance came to know about this then the steem is literally lifting off to the moon :D
I have spare my idlevotes on @smartsteem but didnot see any return from there..also no one replies on their discord. How it gonna work then
It is incredibly easy and intuitive to set up. Check out your balance and check out what you set in terms of automatic payouts or if it is set on manual payouts. The SmartSteem discord channel is very active and I just checked and see that the owner @therealwolf is answering questions every day. I think you have not tried hard enough. I see you have over 1000 Steem Power so you should be able to make some visible payouts. If you would have only dust votes it would be a different story.
@flauwy, thank you so much for your amazing post. it will help us for our future steemit working. I am going to resteem that post : xD
Thanks :)
Wooww friend of great import content, I did not know many of these things with regard to steem power, thank you for the information.
I hope you can make good use of this.
let me just say that it's nice to support people who are posting good content , so i don't set the limit at 30 minutes unless perhaps they have big wallets, in order to help those in my trail. Speaking of which you can apply to join my trail to get automatic upvotes (plse see profile for more info).
Good article with some solid advice. I usually manually upvote the authors and creators I follow but last week I hurt my back badly and I was out of action a few days. I now have the app on my phone and yeah that auto vote services would have really helped me not waste a few days idling at 100%
Will be checking out three services more now. Thanks
Nice post. I utilize what you have raised in here. 8-)