Hey! I hope I'm too late to this post!
I've been waiting for someone to post something exactly like this! Firstly I'd just like to say its really well written and easy to read so thank you so much for that, hard to come by these days on steemit haha
I'm fairly new myself here and have spent hours and hours pouring over posts also trying to figure out the most effective way to use the platform, ROI wise. But when it comes to bid bots, I just always hit a dead end.
For me, I always fall back on the same thing, the bots ROI never ever seems to live up to expectations. Granted I was researching into this at a time where every single bot was being over-sold and we were all getting a negative ROI every single time. I see now that some bots have a positive min ROI. But still, whenever I use the bidbots, lets say I pay 1SBD for a vote, I get 2SBD vote from it. First thing that happens is for me that value always decreases slightly until the payday. Secondly 25% of the value disappears for curation, and thirdly only half of the rest is paid back as SBD, usually around 0.75SBD
Sorry for the hard-to-read wall of text, but I suppose what I'm asking is, I use bitbots, just as you have, I always got a negative ROI, whereas you receive nearly 50% which in any sort on investment sense is absolutely incredible. The only difference between us I can see is that you spend 100's of SBD the promote whereas I only spend 10's of SBD if not 1's haha.
Is all of that extra ROI just coming from that fact that you hit the trending page and I don't? If so what kinda minimum would we be talking about to spend to hit said page?
Sorry again for the wall of text, just excited to hear from someone as seemingly intelligent as you!
P.S I had a creep on your introduce yourself post and you seem absolutely unstoppable, your kids are truly blessed haha
First & foremost, thank you for the compliment.
And now to more important matter at hand, from the experiment that I carried out so far, I noticed 3 things that could help to boost the ROI.
Hitting the trending page really help. If you can stay there for 2 to 3 days, it is even better. On my previous experiment, I was in trending page for at least 2 days. So, That really helped. I am not sure, how this post will play out, we will wait & see, but it doesn't look good, it was in trending page for less than half a day. And it was no where near the top. Can't compete with the likes of all these:
Try not to get flagged by someone with a lot of Steem Power. I don't know how to do this, I mean if someone doesn't like another & he/she wants to do something bad to the other person & it's within his/her power to do so, then, what can you do...
When I did my previous experiment, I posted it at the time when the US is sleeping & the bidbots were not very busy, so I managed to get good ROI from the bots.
Oh and there's one more thing I noticed, the choice of tag is important: choose tags that are not so competitive. I am doing poorly with the tags here because tag like steemit is where the experts are - not suitable for beginners like me.
And finally, in summary, the amount required to hit the trending page is not fixed. It depends on who is already there but it helps to choose a less competitive tag and a timing when most people who use this platform are asleep.
Good luck. :D