Lets see:

1. Look at the multiple voting bots which basically put you into lottery for a small SBD,
2. form a group of people in steemit and upvote each other, slow but steadily all of you can grow together.
3. If you can program create your own bot and use that to amass follower and get into the upvoting system.

For me all these are gaming the system and not using it as it was intended to be used.