My suggestion is that you must understand the context in which Steemit is at this moment (much dislike of the way in which the pool is distributed).
The use of bid bots is something delicate and that is why you have to be careful.
For this reason, it is best to seek growth that is not so ambitious, but rather to gain people little by little. Utopian is a good place where you can expose your work and be well seen and paid.
this is what I do when publishing my regular posts but I thought I worked here hard and it's not a post it's a programming project I worked for weeks to develop as simple as it may look so the regular way this time won't work I need as much exposure as I can get
by the way, I never been on Utopian is it like github but based on steem blockchain?
Utopian is a community of steem for software developments (open source)... many whale have delegated Steem Power to utopian, then it has a lot of power.
When you post, your contribution has to be approved by a moderator... if it is approved then you will get a vote from utopian... you have to follow some rules... they explain them in https://utopian.io/
I was at first mad because of downvotes, but now I understand why they do this, if people continue to get into trending page because they using bots no matter how good your content, than how people will get educated that using both the first place is not good, and new users will know that the only way to get into the trending list is to pay money.