Rise of the Bots - Are your Steemit posts giving you the rewards you deserve?

The Steemit Bots are revolting, no literally they are have you seen the LoveJuice one going on about spraying bodily fluids over each other - so appalling. It’s nearly as bad as when I accidentally turned on show NSFW posts and then browsed the NEW posts lists - it’s put me right off cucumbers for life that is for sure.

Now for many of us starting out on Steemit the first thing you do is look around for some guidance posts, and generally you find most say you need to follow people who post on topics you are interested in, upvote the posts you like and comment on the posts you are upvoting stating why you like the post (preferentially including information about the post, and not using the now standard spam of “Nice picture”, “Good Post”, “I upvote you, you upvote and follow me”. ) I don’t think you have to write a massive reply, but at least showing you looked at what was posted and took in the information - engage the poster is probably the best description.

So like a good steemie I did all this, and posted my own posts in the hope that I would get loads of returned upvotes and comments. You can view my blog https://steemit.com/@c0ff33a and scroll down to the start to see how that went.

Now the reasons for my problems are plenty, to start off with I don’t have very much time each day to devote to being a community member of Steemit - so trying to upvote and comment on people’s posts is limited and the less you do the less you are going to see back. Second, I’m not a people person - I grew up on a farm with my own company to occupy me and that has followed me through life - I don’t have great social skills and struggle to engage people whether in real life or virtually. That’s a big downer on a platform like Steemit where you have to engage and bond with your potential audience to ensure they keep loyal to you.

The big problem however, and I feel from viewing my feed of posts by people I follow it is a common one - is the simple volume of posts occurring every single minute means when you post something it instantly drops down a massive list - and unless someone you interact with just happens to be online browsing when you post they will likely miss it and possibly never even see it to give you and upvote and reply. In this way some really good quality posts, which should be earning a really good author reward for the effort - get 0.05 SBD or other fractions just because it dropped down the list before anyone had chance to see it.

Of course if you just want to share your content to the world whatever, then earning a little reward is no doubt enough. But I’m sure many of us scroll through the hot list and see the same people getting rewards of $10, $40, $80, $100 and just don’t understand why our own posts struggle to even get a single $1. Simple answer is it’s not what you know it’s who you know - and once you have the big upvote power it’s obvious that groups with the same upvote power will latch together and upvote each other to gain even more.

So for the rest of us we either have to befriend a few whales with massive upvote power, or help ourselves by using the old adage speculate to accumulate. That is reinvest the SBD your posts have already created into the new ones to get more value from them - and you do this by paying the bots for upvotes.

This handy list https://steembots.com/#/ shows you all the currently available bots with their current vote power and the value of that vote. You can search the bot name on steemit and on their blog will be the instructions on how to use them - it’s quite simple most work by you sending the bot name the required amount of SBD along with the link to your own article you wish to upvote in the memo.

BUT, it’s a massive gamble - while one the whole you should at least get back what you put in - sometimes you won’t. And this can be particularly bad for Bid Bots likes BellyRub where you send your SBD bid - and it’s gets pooled with others for around 2.5 hours and then the upvote is shared by all the bidders - if many people bid in the same period as you the upvote gets diluted and you might get an upvote less then the amount you sent. This is not good.

Minnowbooster have hit a new spin on the idea, they have a website with a graph showing the available bids you can send - https://www.minnowbooster.net - this graph changes all the time. What you need to do is work out how much you want to send maximum, and then keep refreshing the page until that bid range becomes available - then dive in to your wallet and send it quick before someone else gets in. I prefer to have my wallet all set up ready to send just waiting for the target value to be put in. The bonus of this waiting is you can get really good ROI - last night I got a 97% Upvote - that is I put in 0.65 SBD and got out $1.25.

Investing to gain upvote value works in two ways, first off if you keep making more on your invested money you are increasing your SBD and Steem Power faster. And getting more upvotes also will get your post onto the Hot List and give it more scope for real people to see and enjoy - maybe follow you and support you more in future. But you have to be careful with the Bots, do your homework - visit the bots wallet before you use it and see who has been sending what value to it - and then view their posts to see how well they got a good return.

You don’t have to pay for upvotes though, some are free and easy. First off you can just reply to your own post and mention @originalworks - and it will confirm your work is original and give you a bonus upvote. Also in your post include your location tag - this is mine !steemitworldmap 53.766547 lat -1.801500 long Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. d3scr

This is mine, just change the lattitude and longitude to your own and the physical location text to your own.

The MinnowSupport group are awesome and should be a big one in your arsenal, read more here http://minnowsupportproject.org you need to open a Discord account and then view this page https://discordapp.com/channels/319885228464406528/319885497428344832

Wait at least an hour from creating a new post, then post a message as you will see others do with $upvote yourposturl
The two bots should confirm the upvotes, if one does not upvote wait a day and try again. It’s well worth it, you get around 20 upvotes and while the value is not massive it all helps.

And it’s not just Bot’s that will help you out, I forget how I found https://steemit.com/upvote/@larryphang/mini-power-up-free-upvote-for-followers but he’s well worth following, upvoting an commenting on. More importantly, for a nominal transfer of 0.02 SBD transfer he will upvote the post link you send him, and from experience also comment and resteem. Personally I save him for special posts (maybe this one) because if you flood him with requests I’m sure he would start ignoring quickly - remember this is a real person not a bot. But I think the concept is outstanding, and I want to use it once I can recover my upvote power and get it to the point it makes a difference to people.

Finally the best value to promote your posts is the Resteem bots, these are

22 hours ago Transfer 0.002 SBD to resteem.bot https://steemit.com/photography/@c0ff33a/giving-tigger-a-run-for-his-money-at-oxygen-trampoline-park
22 hours ago Transfer 0.002 SBD to resteemr https://steemit.com/photography/@c0ff33a/giving-tigger-a-run-for-his-money-at-oxygen-trampoline-park
22 hours ago Transfer 0.050 SBD to resteembot https://steemit.com/photography/@c0ff33a/giving-tigger-a-run-for-his-money-at-oxygen-trampoline-park

As you can see the first two are very good value, resteembot requires you send your reputation value - ie mine is 50 so I sent 0.050 - adjust this to your reputation.

To conclude we don’t have to slog away creating post after post on Steemit that rewards little, what you do after your post to it is nearly as important as the post itself. And you don’t need to have unlimited funds available to give your post a boost - free and very inexpensive services are available to get you more reward for your work. And you can use the transparency of Steemit to see what you favourite posters did to replicate it - if you view my wallet https://steemit.com/@c0ff33a/transfers you can see what I have been sending to various bots and how I did out of it - draw your own conclusions.

A future post from me will include plug in sites - where you can further improve your posts, and followers even using separate web sites that link to Steemit.

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.

My Dash Wallet
dash:Xqjemfc9gEmrnXQ7KPdADmNpdpncMHB47C
My Bitcoin Wallet
bitcoin:1G7psTXjKV3URkF7sLprgQrcv9Ar9HoPap

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

Check out this post https://steemit.com/steemfest2/@dylanhobalart/break-the-steem-blockchain-nov-5-2017-round-2 based around SteemFest2 the concept is people who can not attend themselves can be extra active on Steemit during SteemFest to support the event.

Follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/c0ff33a)

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