Have you heard of something called bid bots? They are vote selling bots with massive amounts of Steem Power delegated to them. Anyone can delegate to a bid bot and get paid for it (The profits are roughly equivalent to what you could get by upvoting only your own posts and nobody else upvoting yours). People who want to promote their posts can send STEEM or SBD to a bid bot put their post URL in the memo and get a large upvote from the bid bot they've sent money to. The size of the upvote depends on the amount of money they send. Bid bots are a promotion tool. It is very difficult and time consuming to turn a profit using them, which means that you generally have to pay about as much as you get in the form of an upvote. Money is made by delegators and the operators of bid bots.
The largest payouts without paying for votes with the current levels of STEEM and SBD prices have been around $100-$150. It's extremely difficult to get more than $100. It takes having massive amounts of SP of your own, self-upvoting, something exceptionally interesting to say, having bunch of high-SP friends as well as tens of thousands of followers.
Thank you for the useful info. That's a lot of effort to do it organically.
My article originally added a section on buying resteems from bots, but I thought it would confuse readers who are already struggling with the concept of Steemit itself. I've used bots twice to promote articles - this was one of the two - as an experiment comparing approaches. In both instances I have presently made less than I sent them. At least this one received some votes at all - the other one didn't. Our best performing article so far was around $40, which had dozens of comments and was very useful in the technology space - I'm not seeing much love for our better writing, life, stories, blogs, even our music features - a few bucks apiece. I know Steemit is a rung on the ladder of next gen Internet innovation, so I see it all as learning at the moment, helping me gain ideas for our own applications.