This post is a continuation of yesterday's post on using the various promotion services and bid-bots available to all Stemian's.
If you have not read part #1, then please click HERE first before reading this post.
Minnow Booster is probably the best know promotion service; however they are not the only one, SmartSteem also offers a great product and is growing fast. You can visit their blog here @smartsteem or go directly to their website HERE
Yesterday we covered buying votes via Minnowbooster, today we'll start with "getting votes on your comments". Many of you were amazed when some of my comments received 55 votes, seconds after the comment appeared on the screen. Well it does make a SPASH doesn't it and it is really easy to do.
First (right click on this Minnowbooster Link - choose open in new tab) log into your account using your Steemit Password.
The user information and settings page will then be displayed. Here you can make several changes and start and stop stop two voting services.
To enable automatic votes on your comments simply check the checkbox #1 circled in the above image. "Enable automatic promotion of your comments (still in testing):" Then enter an amount of SBD in the text area below it. ("Max upvote value") -- Keep this low, even 1.5 as shown can generate over 50 votes!! .25 or so is probably a better choice.
Use this feature with caution as if you get too flashy (as I did yesterday) you can draw a lot of ire and negative criticism along with a pretty good batch of comments like this one yesterday, by @gems.and.cookies
WTF(%&@!) 55 votes on a reply that's less than 2 mins old!! Ha ha ha. Now I'm sure you know what you're doing. I should be the one to thank you. Never had a laugh like this in Steemit before now.
There were a lot of similar remarks, so the point is, if you want to stay a bit incognito in your vote helping, this is not the tool you want to crank up.
This is a very useful tool and can add to your profitability on Steemit a great deal. To enable this feature, you need to click the two checkboxes (#2). Minnow Booster will respond with a request for you to approve this via an authentication window that logs you into SteemConnect.com -- Once you complete this dialog you will be returned back to the edit user info. page.
Everyone on Steemit is allowed to up vote posts and comments as they so choose. However, you can only up vote so many before you start running out of voting power. This voting power is removed at a rate of 2% for each up vote (at 100% power).
Note: If you have less than 300 SP then your votes are always at 100%. If you have 300 SP or greater, you see a slider that you can adjust how much power to apply to an up vote (or down vote).
So as we vote, our power is reduced, but this power is restore back to us at a rate of 20% per day. To keep an even keel, the magic number is 11 full power up votes. Said another way, eleven full power up votes per day will still allow you have full VP restored each 24 hours.
But there is really nothing stopping you from voting at full power 20 or 30 times per day, it just means the votes you make have less weight and you will not be able to get back to full VP in 24 hours.
So how do we take advantage of all this information? Most of us do not curate more than a few articles per day, that means that a large amount of our total available votes go unused. Minnow Booster allows you to sell them this unused voting power and to select exactly how much VP you want to keep in reserve to be used in your manual curation.
If you look in the image above (#2) you notice I set the slider at 25%. This means that I am allowing Minnow Booster to purchase voting power from me as long as they leave me with at least 25% in reserve. I then get to use the 25% reserve to curate manually.
The math on this is very good. Minnow booster returns back to you the full amount of the up vote you sold, less about 15% in fees. This means if your up vote was used by another member on Minnow Booster and it was worth $.10, you will receive $.085 for selling this vote.
This is pure profit! You do not have to have any SBD to enable this feature.
Another very powerful feature about vote selling is the number of followers you can potentially receive from it. Each time your vote is sold, someone else receives it. The person who received it, paid for this service and they are often looking at the performance of their blog very carefully. When they see the up vote, they may come to check you out and see what's in your blog. This is a VERY easy and useful way to engage with the community.
Of note. Minnow Booster often sells votes for as little as .001, so even if you don't have a lot of SP you can participate in this program. The more SP you have, the more profitable this tools is. Another very important point is, if you do have more SP, many of your vote sells will be at far less than 100% full power, which translates into more total engagement with the other Stemian's.
Vote selling is a very powerful feature --- Try it out for a few days.
Leasing SP can be VERY profitable if you use it properly and you can lease it affordably. The latter part of this statement is the problem right now as SBD as moved up in price dramatically, making the cost to lease SP higher as well. Still it can be profitable if you know how.
The pie chart above shows where most of the leases that have been successful occurred. Per the chart, most leases have been awarded between 90 and 120 SP per Steem. I'll explain more below.
The more Steem Power (SP) you have, the greater influence in Steemit. Each vote you make is of a higher value. If you are somehow able to capture this increased voting power for yourself, then you can profit dramatically from it. One way is of course by leasing SP and then selling your votes to Minnow Booster (or any other promotional service that buys votes. Another way is to delegate this higher SP back to the bot directly. (We'll cover that below as well)
Leasing SP (and having it delegated to your account) at an affordable amount can have a substantial ROI with minimal manual effort. To get the process started, you need to enter your bid. See the form below.
The image above reflects an attempt to lease 5000 SP for 1 week. I am willing to pay 50 steem (one time cost) for this lease of 5000 SP. The annual percentage rate for this lease is calculated automatically at 23.4%
This lease could be successful as I have entered values that seem to fall within the sweet spot.
The bottom two entries are calculated for you. Review the figures, make sure you really want to do this and the press Lease. You will be asked to confirm your decision.
Before proceeding to press Lease, you must already have a sufficient amount of Steem (not SBD) in your Minnow Booster account. If not, use the deposit form under the balances section to make this deposit first.
Your bid will be entered into the queue. All bids remain active for no more than 3 days. If someone likes your bid, they can accept your terms and Minnow Booster will make the transfer of SP from them to you, for the specified price and time.
All bids in the queue can be seen and scrolled through by using click the "New Lease Request" on the left pane. See image below.
If you happen to be lucky enough to have a lot of SP and would like a nice steady APR, then you can lease your SP to another member by simply clicking the "Fill this offer" button. You will be directed to a new page that shows the totals and allows you to proceed with the authorization of the lease agreement.
If you have some excess SP (congratulations!) and you're looking for a really passive way to turn the SP into more SP and SBD, then delegating your SP directly to the bot is one way to do it. Minnow Booster explains it like this:
Delegate STEEM POWER to the
@minnowbooster bot and get roughly the returns you would get if you voted up only your own posts, but without the shame! You will earn and be paid daily with a prorata share of the funds paid by users for
@minnowbooster to up vote their posts, less our facilitation fee.
You can always undelegate but will lose the earnings for the current unfinished day.
If this is something that interest you, simply fill out the form, authenticate the delegation and you're all set. It will remain in place until you cancel it. This can be very useful if you are going on vacation and do not want to have any visible activity on the platform, but of course would not mind having some revenue.
Vote selling is a powerful tool that can reward you directly via SBD each day and indirectly due to the fact your vote is likely to be noticed by those who have purchased it. In addition, you will be paid for the curation service you provided (through MB), just as if you had manually up voted a post or comment.
Automatic comment promotion is useful to get your comments to float above the spam, but use it with caution.
Leasing SP can be very profitable when you are able to get it cheep enough that you can turn around and use it with the vote selling tool or delegating it back to a bot (perhaps even your own bot).
Delegating to the bot and filling lease requests are great ways to get passive income from your SP.
I really hope you found this article to be useful. Please up vote me (manually is just fine) and leave me a comment. I promise I'll do my best to respond quickly.
Still to come -- Using bid-bots for a larger whale size vote.
Disclaimer -- I am still very new to Steemit and have plenty to learn myself!
Invest wisely for the future.