First of all, this is not an official Steemit guide, please read this as a public sharing with open mind. If you find it difficult, don't try to understand the whole thing. Just read through, and in the end you read the formula and you shall have a big picture of what upvote is and how to utilize it properly.

I'm just goint to make this very simple and short and hope it can benefit some friends out there.

First, check your wallet. Every new registered account are delegated with 15sp

What does SP do?

So what does this 15sp do? It is a loan amount from someone who is so nice to put money in your bank account so you can move around, make post, upvote people, and receiving upvotes. You go to office you need money to pay transport correct? And you work for a whole day, you still gotta eat, and you need to pay for food am I right? Before you can get your salary, you need someone to help you on your feet correct? So, this good Samaritan put this 15sp into your account as sponsor, so you can start to earn Steem and SBD by creating content in Steemit. And people with bigger SP, meaning their UPVOTE will worth MORE value! WOHOO!

SP = power to give money to other people

Where does SP came from?

Let's get on with the following important point. We assume everybody knows UPVOTE is the friendly gesture to PUT MONEY into your account. Simply said, if someone like your content, they give you an UPVOTE, and kaching! Money come in. Not quite so. There's no actual money going in and out at all. The only thing that is transacting between is VEST. VEST is something we don't see at Steemit platform. You may check on https://steemd.com/@username to find how many VEST in your account. You may also find people to VEST into your account, and you can also VEST for other people. VEST original money in Steemit that we can't see. What we see everyday is STEEM and SBD. In order to generate STEEM or SBD, one need to have enough VEST that made up of a handsome number of SP, with that SP to give an UPVOTE, and that UPVOTE become STEEM/SBD.

SP=number of VEST combined

Voting Power / Bandwidth

Now you can see your voting power by viewing it in https://steemd.com/@username again

Now things gets a little interesting

Voting weight(SP) is your influence token. 1steem can be exchange into 1SP. You need this in your wallet to allow you to move around in Steemit.
Voting power is your game token(how many life you got). Everyone has 100%. 1 vote going out is 2%. Once you used up, then you can't vote anymore. It takes 24hours to generate 20%. Which means if you vote more than 10 times in 24 hours, you're definitely depleting your voting power sooner or later.
Bandwidth is the allocated transaction limit. Imagine you have money in the bank account, and you have a bank card, but the phone line is dead. Can you withdraw money from the machine by executing a proper transaction? The answer is no.
Having this as a bigger picture, you'll know how to control your game better. All the above 3 are connected.

How does the UPVOTE decide the VALUE

Now, we're digging deeper. An upvote is a TRANSACTION being trigger by the user. When you read an article, you decided to reward the author, you can press the little upvote button. Once the calculation completed, you'll see the article value increase(or not, when your SP is too little)

Value going out via upvote = SP(amount of vest) * UPVOTE(2%) * MarketPrice of SBD

Does it affect my own money?

Let's look at the previous discussion again.
SP * UPVOTE, and then you lose 2% of your VOTING POWER. Again, you lose 2% of your VOTING POWER. You do not lose your SP, you only lose your VOTING POWER. What goes out from your account is VEST. Now, don't get excited and start blasting your upvote everywhere. Everytime when you hit the upvote button, 2% goes out from your account, what happen is that 2% deducted from your VOTING POWER. The next time, your 2% will be based on 98%, which means in actual face it's only 1.96% of 15SP being generated and sending over to the person who receive your upvote. The more time you use, the lower of VEST going out.

Use SP to generate VEST in exchange of VOTING POWER. And you use TIME to regenerate VOTING POWER.

How do I make my upvote worth more?

It is simple. With the previous discussed formula, all you gotta do is increase your INPUT, your voting WEIGHT, which is your SP. Big engines, stronger compression, more fuel, bigger explosion. Like clock work.

What are the benefit of upvoting others?

This is kinda cool. When you give your upvote to other people, you're actually receiving back 25% of the VEST! Imagine, if you giveaway 1000vest via upvote, you'll be collecting back 250vest. Isn't this cool?! And these VEST will be transfer back to your wallet and make you stronger!

That's nice! Can I upvote for myself?

Ofcourse you can! But, at some point you'll be wondering, should I save that 1000vest, give to someone so they notice me, we make friends so the new friend would also give me his/her 1000vest? In the end, I am still collecting back that 250vest when I gave it to people, and it gave me a new chance to make new friend who will do the same for me.

I press the upvote button, but the value didn't change

So, your SP is too small. When you hit the button, the value doesn't change. It simply means the amount of VEST going out does not make up $0.01, but that doesn't mean no vest has gone out. Even if your dollar value doesn't show significant, do not stop voting. All we gotta do is keep the voting count, give them to the best potential post, the person who receive it gets rewarded, and we collect back our share of reward. Rather than wasting our voting power. As long as we make sure our voting power is sufficient to generate good amount of vest going out. Make sure you vote for newer post that has a huge potential that some other people will vote. Make sure you hunt for those good content post which is new, more than 15 minutes and less then 30 minutes are the best. Put in your vote and let other people put in more VEST so the post will help you generate more VEST in return.

Now do you see this? These are the reward of voting $0.00 to other people, but still consistently doing it. And the value will return as $0.00 still, but there's a VEST at the back which will accumulate and make up a beautiful number in the end. You can find these info via https://steemnow.com/@username

And you can find your vote value here as well. As of now, my 1 vote is worth about 0.04 only, but I am collecting 0.06SP yesterday. Which make it not a bad idea to utilize my upvote correctly, make friends and get more than what I gave.

Have fun and I hope my explanation doesn't drive you nut.

New to Steemit, what to do with my upvotes