Forget about all the complex advises you have seen before, I'm gonna make it simple and NATURAL for you! Steemit is special and distinguished for its specific way of encouraging people to provide content AND curating the provided content. do you agree?

First things first: the definition of Content Curation

Content curation is the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Services or people that implement content curation are called curators. Curation services can be used by businesses as well as end users.
Wikipedia

image source - modified

Being Natural

You are a contributor of the STEEM platform, to provide and audit great content. So being organic and natural is very important for the sustainability of the platform.

Regretfully, many accounts with big wallets, are just milking the reward pool, by trying vote on posts with high payouts and they don't care about the content quality, which is the essence of this platform.

There are many great content on this platform which receive nearly zero attention. So being natural is my first advice.

Voting time

If you are looking for maximizing your curation reward, out of the healthy and natural contribution to the ecosystem, don't vote before 15 minutes of the post age. any time after 15 minutes is great.

Current Payout of the post

A post which has already received lots of reward, doesn't need more upvotes + you won't get rewarded with upvoting it. it doesn't mean you shouldn't upvote it. you still can show your empathy and appreciation by voting the content, but if the curation + the reward is important for you, this is not the right place.

What does lots of rewards? I can categorize levels as follows:
0 - $3 payout: high level target for voting
$3 - 10 payout: medium level
$10 - 30 payout: low level
$30+ payout: out of my attention

Again, this is IF you are looking for rewards, I have personally upvoted many posts with high payouts, just because I thought they have really done a great job. by voting them, I just wanted to express my appreciation and I knew there would be no pay checks! ;)

Let's see a sample:

here you can see, I have received almost my voting power back, from upvoting a post, which hasn't even used bot and paying votes (only 3.5$ payout post). All I have done, is the above checklist, as below:

• the post was genuine and worthy
• I voted after 15 mins of publish time
• it was below $1 when I voted

Self post voting curation

There is a big opportunity to receive rewards on your own posts. look here:

As you can see, I will receive almost 4 times to my voting weight (my vote is 0.18 cents here, my author + curator reward is almost 0.67 cents) The reason is I have exactly voted my own post at 15 minutes after posting.

on this specific example, I have to explain how I use bid bots to increase my post visibility, in a separate post. I will explain my strategy, my concerns and profit/loss calculation (yes! there is losses if you don't do the right math!)

So please keep following my blog and if you find this post informative, please feel free to UPVOTE ;)

P.S.: I have to thank @steemchiller for the great effort he has put on steemworld.org, which I have used the screenshots in this post to explain the subject. I use his site regularly to monitor my account activities and to support him for what he has done for free, we can vote his posts on his page.