Have you ever tried using a bid bot? It might surprise you to find out that there are quite a few of them actually.

Heres a quick list of the top of my head:

booster
bellyrub
buildawhale
discordia
lovejuice
minnowpond
minnowhelper
upgoater
sneaky-ninja
steemdiffuser
nettybot
voter
and I know I missed at least a few more (help me out in the comments below).

There are many bid bots out there that are all basically the same.
You send money in to a bid bot account and based on how many people also vote and the amount of money the others put in, you get an upvote based on the percentage of money you sent to the bid bot.
It's a little hard to explain so just hang in there for a little bit.

I have been using bid bots for a while now as a minnow to try to build up some cash flow.
They are rather tricky if you don't really understand them.
I have had my fair share of bad experiences with these bots, especially before I knew the tricks to using them.
Now I want to help other minnows from having some of these same bad experiences.

Whenever I had these bad experience I usually got the same answer from the bots or their creators "don't use the bot if you don't understand it" which was dumb because I have read all of the post created about these bots and how to use them.
I never understood what they had meant until I found the trick.
Eventually after enough digging around I finally found a website that has been created so you can know exactly the amount of money you will make with each bid. This is the trick!

It is Dr. Otto's Bid Analyzer (website directly below)

https://rawgit.com/msg768/mysteemit/master/bidder.html

With this site you can enter the name of any bid bot and the amount you want to send it will tell you how much money you will make, how much time is left, how many people are in the bid, the total of what they have contributed, the price of a 100% upvote and more.
You can change your amount then recalculate to see how to make the most of your bid, its a really cool site!

There is also www.steemnow.com

On this site you can type in the bots name (or anyone on steemit) and find out how much bidding power they have who they have voted for recently and a few other details (its a good site to keep in your favorites next to dr. ottos analyzer).
This feature comes in use with some of the bots because they don't always power up to 100% upvote every time, you want to make sure you bot will have full power before it bids, or you might loose money.

Now you might be wondering why I gave you all this information for free, well I'm glad you didn't just stop reading after the tips because this is the important part. Most of these bid bots CHEAT. I know it sounds crazy but if you start watching these sites closely you will realize everytime you should get an incredibly big vote something goes wrong and the bid is delayed for sometimes more than 6 hours (bellyrub) and I've seen some (nettybot) go more than a day without bidding at all! Just collecting peoples money.
Most of these bots are created by witnesses on steemit and I find that disturbing.
They are basically taking advantage of people who don't understand the platform and nobody can do anything about it except not use the service anymore?
This is ridiculous and I had to say something.
Now don't get me wrong, some of these bots just have bugs occasionally and the creators are more than happy to fix any problems you encounter.
However with others just won't reply or will tell me that I didn't understand the bot (which is garbage) and I shouldn't play if I don't like the results. I would have liked the results if the bot would have paid when it was scheduled to.

So this is my suggestion for everyone, watch these bots closely before giving them money.
It's not always worth it.
If they rip you off, say something!

The only upvote services I have found that never give me problems are minnowbooster and randowhale.

I hope this helps some people out as it took me a long time to figure all of this stuff out.
Please enjoy it and good luck with all your voting bot endeavors! :)

I just found this site put up by @yabapmatt that proves what I'm saying about voting starting late! (Follow him for great material!) https://s3.amazonaws.com/yabapmatt/bottracker/bottracker.html

Peace, love and all that hippie shit

*these images were taken from google image