Voting Rewards, Steem Power and Voting Power

In the post, I will outline the rewards mechanism in relation to upvoting because it's a little bit tricky. Hopefully this will help the community out.

There are many ways to earn money on Steemit, the two most common ways are:

Write a good post and have others vote on it
Vote early on a good post and hope it becomes popular

Payouts to Steemers are paid 75% to the writer and 25% to the voter.

As you can see, the community earns money on both writing AND voting.

What are the depending factors on how much you earn?

Popularity of the post - How much is the post worth after 7 days? (Once you post, it can collect votes and money for 7 days. After 7 days, the amount is paid 75% to the writer and 25% to the voters)
Steem Power (Your slice of the 25% post reward is based on your SP)
Voting Power (How much is your vote worth)
Timing of when you vote (The earlier you vote, the bigger your slice of the voting pie)

Popularity of the post
For example, if a post ends up make $10, 25% of this will go to the voters. Lets say there are 10 voters, and each voter has the same 100 STEEM Power (SP), and vote weight, each voter will make ($10 * 25%)/10 -- $0.25

What is Steem Power?
Steem Power is king in Steemit. The more SP you have, the more your vote is worth and the more you earn from the voting rewards. If you're staying on Steemit long term, get as much Steem Power as you can.

Here you can see that 500 SP can give each vote $0.10. Imagine if everyone has 500 SP and votes your post 100 times in a day? That's $10 per post.

What is Voting Power?
Every user starts with 100% voting power. Every vote depletes this energy bar by 2%. Every 24 hours, your voting power is regenerated by 20%. So you should only vote 10-20 times a day or your voting power will decrease very low and you won't help anybody or make any money for yourself.

Timing
It's important to have the right timing when voting a post. Always vote for a post after 20 minutes or you will have a penalty and not make any money.

For example, If you vote for a $0.01 post at 30 minutes. The next day you come back, and the post is now worth $100. You've just earned a good chunk for being early to upvote the post.

This concludes a quick overview of voting and voting rewards. I'll write more about the other details soon.