As a small fry here, I believe that bot voting is essential to starting out here on Steemit, especially if you want to increase your visibility. With bot votes, you'll be able to get more eyeballs on your posts, increasing upvotes and followers. Once one achieves sufficient followers to upvote their posts organically, the use of bot votes should decrease.
From a monetary standpoint, it's a no-brainer to use bot voting. From my experiences, you make back your investment in the bot vote while essentially getting a free promotion.