Do not get silly with your post UpVotes - Get Smart - with SmartSteem

Making your way with your posts on Steemit can be a challenge, if you are lucky, and very talented then you will be producing posts that are so amazing everyone wants to share and upvote them and you will always get very good rewards for your effort. Unfortunately Steemit more often does not work like that, so many posts are created every single minute of the day your work has already disappeared before anyone got to see it. Even if you have a good follower count - they can easily miss your post in their feed because it is so busy - or just because as a global community you might have posted while many of your followers are asleep! So just creating a post is just one small step in the bigger picture of marketing and promoting it - some of the biggest brands in the world today did not reach that level by creating a product - or brand name - and just hoping people would find it. They push, push, push it in front of the audience - billboards, social marketing, they make sure when you see their product in a store you want it because you subliminally remember seeing it advertised in your favourite tv show, on a billboard - in the media.

Steemit is just the same, once you create a post you need to advertise it - help people find it and gain the upvotes and rewards it deserves. To get the best visibility for our posts we need to give them an upvote boost - promoting them to the hot list and getting more people looking and enjoying the content. As Steemit has grown so has the upvote services you can use to promote your posts, by paying a little SBD you can get a greater upvote value from the Bid Bots but it's a lottery - you can use the upvote bot list https://s3.amazonaws.com/yabapmatt/bottracker/bottracker.html#bid<< to check out when a bot might be profitable before investing in it - but it can be hard work and even with a few minutes left on a Bid Bot round someone could put in a silly bid that makes your own bid unprofitable.

But fortunately we have two new services which take the pain and hassle out of the bid bots. @smartmarket is a simple upvote service, for example I sent the minimum $4SBD today with the URL of the post I wanted upvoting and it went from 0 reward straight to $11.57 SBD reward - instantly. No waiting for bid range ends, no loosing out or getting a tiny $1 better then you put in because someone else over bidded - straight forward easy ROI. Now I know some people will say straight away "Well on the 50/50 rewards and after curation you will just get back the SBD you put in" - that is true. But if you post a $0 reward post and after seven days it is still that you have nothing. If you pay $4 SBD to get an $11.57 SBD upvote you will get something back after 7 days - at least what you put in, plus valuable Steem Power which is rapidly becoming the most valuable and sought after asset on Steemit. Plus - when you promote your post it has greater value of being seen - people want to upvote a post with a good reward value because they can earn off the curation rewards - which are higher from a higher reward post. So whatever happens when you use spare SBD to upvote a post - it can only gain you - if you upvote it @smartmarket

@smartsteem is an external web site that works alongside @smartmarket , as you can see above they work with good intent and high values - this service is the brainchild of the talented @therealwolf and @artbunny . You can visit https://smartsteem.com and log in with the very clever, and very safe SteemConnect service - while this links the site to your Steemit Account only you can authorise it to do things on your behalf - and it can not access your Steemit login details so it is totally safe.

Once logged in we can do many things, to start out the aim is to get WhiteListed - that is to have your account verified by a real person removing upvote constraints and getting your content promoted to others on the site. Because it is a manual process it can take quite some time - but it is worth the wait they need to ensure you are posting real quality content.

Additional features are available, you can Delegate Steem Power to SmartMarket and earn a return from it's upvotes proportional to your delegation. You can also sell your upvote, so that when a Steemit user requests an upvote in your upvote range you can provide it and return a little value back for giving that upvote. You can also set SmartSteem to auto upvote your created posts, so every time you post it will give you an immediate upvote boost to the equivalent value you set in the system - yet again saving you the hassle and worry of trying to deal with the Wild West of Bid Bots.

I have been using this service for a few weeks now, and it is by far the most polished, smooth running system I have encountered on Steemit. More importantly this is a service by content creators - for content creators - it is designed and actively trying to promote the best quality content. Anyone can use a bid bot to upvote a post, and often this means a content scraped from the internet get's unjust rewards while real creative content creators get little rewards despite producing great content - @smartmarket gives the real content creators the opportunity to promote their content and get the rewards it deserves.

Throughout my epic journey on Steemit I have encountered many amazing content creators, and wonderful people - as a social media site it is wonderful to find interesting people from around the world and enjoy the content they produce. I was fortunate enough to be dragged here by @old-guy-photos and while it took me some time to find my way - I'm glad he kept pushing me because in the end he was right. As I grew I found wonderful people like @saqib who has grown with me and always upvotes and comments on my every post - a true trooper even though I struggle now to leave comments on his he always has my back. The more I post the greater the support, wonderful people keep looking for and supporting my content like @nirgf and @markperandin I found through @guidesteemit . I was very fortunate to have my activity on Steemit overlooked by the amazing @fulltimegeek who bestowed a steward of Gondor Steem Power short term delegation on me to help push and promote new and growing users - such an honour when all I was trying to do was help others find their own way - together with @coolguy123 and @old-guy-photos we have done our best to promote new and exciting users of Steemit. I also found @abh12345 as another of the Stewards of Gondor he is able to crunch the numbers and see how well we all do supporting the fledglings - I'm not sure how well I am doing but he seems to be finding that @coolguy123 is single handedly supporting Steemit on his own reaching out with over 800 unique upvotes to users per week - (I don't think @coolguy123 ever sleeps).

Moving on my posts get so many comments now I find it hard just to keep up with them, so many wonderful people and I want to do my best to check out their blogs and upvote them - but my time is so limited and literally I can not get around every one I want to even if I spent every minute of every day (which I can't) - so my thanks to the wonderful guys who always view and upvote my posts, leave a comment and generally make my days awesome 😎 this is by no means everyone but thank you so much @beforandafter , @hassanben , @larryphang , @blockgators , @aherbil , @kouba01 , @kiorsergey , @coolbuddy , @mounire , @bapin , @hariabbad , @mstafford , @techmojo , @askmee , @mejustandrew , @funkylove , @klasanaj , @fcbnews , @akandadelwar - when I post you guys some how always find it and leave a comment and for that I am truly grateful. I am doing my best to keep up with your own work - but my time is limited so even with the best of intent I might miss you now and again.

In my vlog last week https://steemit.com/vlog/@c0ff33a/c0ff33-vlog-22-12-17-0-the-christmas-vlog I called out some of the amazing ladies I have encountered and followed on Steemit, we are so lucky to have such a talented and dedicated selection of people on here and they produce by far the most outstanding content you could ever wish to enjoy - and they always respond to comments good or bad - and work hard to follow new people and support new content - do take the time to check them out your lives will be so much richer for it.

To conclude Steemit is a growing platform, it needs us to grow, and it needs not just posts from us but also upvotes on others posts and comments on them. The rewards from creating a post are a big gain, but with the multiple spam posts being created it is obvious too many people thing the more posts you create the more you gain. You don't, there is no limit but realistically one post a day can do you fine. Payout is after seven days - do one post every seven days if you keep giving it little bumps you can still grow with that one post! 20 Posts a day is very unlikely to get you any more reward then one or two, plus if each one has little interesting content people will just stop paying attention to you. Concentrate on creating each post - make it special, unique to you - something different - put YOU into your post - learn from the masters - the great content creators - some of the best I have found in my time are @acromott who just creates the most amazing posts on health and fitness with acrobatics - just please looks at his vlog. @Velimir who has the most amazing blog on his Motorcycle tours - featuring quite often his motorcycle which is just stunning - a truly great piece of machinery in the hands of a truly great man. @jaybird who literally creates the greatest ManWhich's of all time (it's a sandwich of Fred Flintstone proportion), on a more solemn note also the wonderful @cryptopie - a true bastion of how Steemit can support the most needy - his blog is all the testament you need to read. But now I am sad because in looking him up, his last post was 9 hours ago and it might have been his last - such a wonderful human being - doing his best despite the greatest adversity. I'm shedding a tear right now just thinking about he may have gone...

If you enjoyed my post don’t forget to leave an Upvote, feel free to comment on what you liked or where I can do better even. Follow @c0ff33a for regular and varied posts, photography, my weekly VLOG, posts on coffee roasting and brewing - just follow and see.

JoinSteamfollower and get upvotes in return for upvotes
https://steemfollower.com/?r=158
It’s free, simple, easy to find new content to upvote and get your own content seen by more users and possibly upvoted.

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Feel free to help me fill them if you have any spare crypto currency you would like to share ;-)

For more upvotes and content sharing join the GuideSteemit team discord https://discordapp.com/channels/374566683920171023/374576552068775946

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All photos are my own, taken with my iPhone. All my steemit posted pictures can be freely used by other Steemit users in their own blog posts - all I ask is that you follow me and credit @c0ff33a linking to my post you took it from.

!steemitworldmap 53.766547 lat -1.801500 long Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. d3scr

If you pray, or can offer hope in any way you can - please do send it to @cryptopie - a comment on his last post would mean so much - I have followed him for so long and done my best to engage with his posts - but with being so busy in the last week I have been behind and now I find out he has been so unwell - if he passes I will never, ever, forgive myself.

Stay strong @cryptopie, your were the greatest man I never had the opportunity to meet in person - but your life story truly did enrich my own. 🙏🏼