This post is a continuation of the previous articles on using the various promotional 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.

In this post I will cover Bid-bots and how to use them properly.

Please right click on this LINK and select "Open in new tab" (varies from browser to browser). You should now have the most widely used bid-bot tracker website open.

Before we begin, it is probably worth taking a second to explain just what a "Bid-bot" is.

If you are a Steemian, then you have some voting power. The more Steem Power (SP), the more voting power. Bid-bots have a lot of SP. With this large SP, they may have upvotes worth several hundred SBD/Steem.

We all dream about having a whale come along and notice our great article, loving it and giving us a 100% upvote worth some major $. But the reality is, there are a lot of great articles out there and ours often just scrolls into the abyss of the down scroll.

Enter the Bid-bot, these whales will vote on your fine article in return for payment. It really is pretty fundamental.

Bid-based voting bots work on a bidding system. You can send any amount of SBD above the minimum (minimums vary for each bot) and once the bot account reaches 100% voting power it splits a 100% upvote between all of the bids based on each bid's % of the total amount bid during that period.

It takes 2.4 hours for voting power to return to 100% after a 100% upvote so each bidding period typically lasts roughly 2.4 hours. Recently some bots have switched to giving out a 50% upvote every 1.2 hours instead. You can see this indicated next to the "Vote Value" in the table below.

Take the following example: With a 2.4 hour bidding period user A sends $1 to a voting bot and user B sends $3. The total bid is $4 so that means that user A will get a 25% upvote on their post and user B will get a 75% upvote. If the bot's 100% upvote is worth more than $4 then both user A and B will receive an upvote worth more than they have spent.

Please note that vote values are based on the current value of STEEM. As STEEM prices rise or fall the value of votes will too. Additionally 25% of the value of votes cast more than 30 minutes after a post has been made go to the curation rewards, so for a $0.75 payment you would need at least a $1.00 upvote to be profitable if you are taking curation rewards into account.

There are two types of bid-bots, manual and automatic. Manual bid-bots generally have much lower SP and therefor cast much lower valued upvotes, but they can be useful as they do not receive as much traffic which often results in a higher ROI for you.

However, we are going to concentrate on the automated bid-bots and how to calculate the actual return.

In order to fully understand the return on our investment (ROI), we are going to have to understand what that $ means next to the payout value on the bottom of every post.

In the image above, you see the value $66.99. This is not dollars and it is not SBD. It is a combination of SBD and Steem, referred to by our friend over at Steem Supply as STU (Steem Token Unit).

Please right click on this Steem Supply and (open in a new tab), and play around with this great calculator until you get a handle on just what these STU's are.

OK, these calculations are pretty complicated, so luckily when you use the automated bots on steembottracker.com, they do the calculations for us, but it can still be a bit confusing. So it its time to unravel the mystery.

See the above image.

• eBoomerang has a 100% vote capability of 101.76 SBD.

• It will accept a bid of no less than 1.50 SBD (DO NOT SEND LESS -- IT MAY NOT GET RETURNED -- @appreciator for instance will NOT return your bid if you send in less than the minimum!)

• eBoomerang will not upvote on any post more than 2.5 days old.

• Currently there are 69.24 SBD in total bids for this round.

• The bidding pool is pretty full, and Steembottracker is recommending that no more than 7.08 SBD be added in bids.

• The next vote will occur in 1 minute and 17 seconds.

So I waited 1 minute and captured the final bid results for the round, see image below.

Please click on the "Details" button the right of one of the bid-bots to see the bidding details. Example below:

According to the "Current ROI" in the image above, the round ended with a small loss of return. That is, after curation, you will have paid a bit more for the bid (in equivalent USD), then you as the author will receive back (in equivalent USD). (But I'll talk about how we can change this below.)

Looking at the first bidder, aamirijax, bid 1.50 SBD, based on today's SBD market value the 1.50 SBD = $7.88 USD. They will receive a vote worth $1.99 SBD. BUT, they only get 75%, so the actual return is $1.4925 SBD. A very small loss.

So at this point, you need to decide why are you wanting to use bid-bots in the first place?

• 1 To make a direct profit on your bid or
• 2 To promote your quality article by giving it some visibility and the impression that it has worth, come take a look.

If you are going after #1 only, then you lost out (and you need to use the strategy I will talk about later in this post.), however, if #2 is your goal, then you have succeeded very nicely. You will just want to use larger bids in order to achieve the maximum visibility and promotion.

OK, Its time to talk about these STU again, using an actual example from my account. In my wallet is the transaction below:

7 days ago Transfer 10.000 SBD to upme https://steemit.com/steemit/@bycoleman/a-post-of-much-greater-value-how-to-increase-your-vote-count-dramatically-just-like-the-big-fish-do

Looking at the vote detail in SteemD

voter	weight	wgt%	rshare	pct	time
upme	0.00148 B	54.44%	3,002,088,666,037	2.85%	2018-02-07T17:49:39

You can see I received a 2.85 % up vote from @upme. This single vote accounted for more than 54% of the total vote value of this post (so far). And then there is this big number 3,002,088,666,037 called "Rshares". The RShares is the actual number that used by the blockchain to calculate the final payout.

If you want to know the exact Author and Curator rewards used in an up vote and down vote here is the best I have found on this subject by @jga -- But to be honest, even with the explanation, it is still hard to understand.

This graphic is truly excellent in depicting the upvote flow.

Source -- By @jga

So, why have I told you about all this, well simply put, you cannot tell when you place your bid with a bid-bot just how much your payout is going to be and just how much your total reward at the close of the post will be exactly. (7 days after posting).

Based on today's SBD/Steem market value, for a bid made 30 minutes after the article was submitted, you need a payout of 2.25% - 2.50% (as displayed on the bottom of your post) vs the SBD you sent in as a bid, to actually break even. Luckily, the "Details" section on the bid bot attempts to calculate this; as well as the calculator that is above the bid section. This calculator uses the current bid pool of each bot to show you the (near) real time break down of your bid vs what you will receive in both SP and STEEM.

If you use this calculator and/or the calculation that is shown in the "Details" section for each bid-bot and the value is positive, then you will probably break even or see a small profit.

BUT ... Everyone else is also looking at these same figures, looking for the best ROI. Often a slew of bids come in just before the round is closed. So, if making a profit on the bid is important to you, then you should only place bids on bots that are about to cast their vote AND the ROI is still better than 25%. Often you will see better ROI's when the USA is sleeping and on the weekends.

You can also place an early bid with a bot using a proportionally large amount of SBD. By doing this, you have already taken a large chunk of the bot's voting capability, which may cause others to refrain from bidding. Problem is though, many bidders bid directly from their wallets and do not even use a bottracking website to see the current ROI.

Both of the above methods result in hit and miss payouts and there is simply is no guarantee you will receive a net positive bid. Personally, I view these promotional tools as a form of advertisement, which I fully expect will have associated costs. Bid-bots compared to Google "Adwords" are a REAL bargain!

BUT, if you are REALLY set on getting the best return for your bid, then give this a try to maximize your ROI.

• Create your article, proof it twice and get it ready to press the submit button (POST). I like to make a copy of the text and save it just in case there is a crash of some sort.
• Go to the bot tracking website and start watching the bots that are at the top of the list and wait for a bot that is about to cast their vote. If the bot shows a positive or small negative return and the round will end in the next 5-10 minutes, then POST your article, get the URL of your article and cast your bid using the "Send Bid" button on the far right of the bot. You have to get this done before the bidding ends for the round.

Note: I actually send the bid directly from my wallet using the transfer feature, for security reasons (more later), but either way -- send your bid to the bot. You can have this ready to go as well, less the memo field.

Your bid will be displayed at the bottom of the bid list within a few minutes.

If the bot up votes your post within 30 minutes, then a larger portion of the upvote will go to you the author. The exact value "slopes" off in proportion to the time difference between the submission of the post and the time of the vote.

Now the above 30 minute window can be a bit hard to achieve for a second reason and that is, the bot may simply not bid for many minutes after the round closes. But you can give it a try if you really want to play around with maximizing the ROI.

But the best way to maximize ROI is really much simpler.

Write quality articles, then use the bid-bots to gain visibility. Articles that have large payouts attract attention FAST for several reasons:

• If the number of votes is increasing rapidly and the payout is climbing then the post may appear on the "HOT" list.
• Quality articles that have larger payouts attract more votes. 1) They are quality, 2) Curators want to share in the rewards pool, so they upvote.
• People vote simply because they want you to notice them since you are an author that knows how to get it done.

Write quality articles that are likely to have a wide audience appeal and promote them substantially and your long run ROI will also be substantial.

More votes from others = more followers, and more adrenaline for you == even better articles down the road, with even more votes and more followers .....

Don't bother trying to promote junk articles, memes, dtubes links etc. You probably will not achieve positive results.

Think quality and target audience. Great articles that are likely to appeal to a larger audience are simply more likely to receive votes. Create articles you can express your true passion in, your expertise and your personal experiences, these are major factors in seeing a great ROI.

OK, I mentioned security risk. Currently the bidbottracking site takes your bid information including your password and THEN sends this information to SteemConnect. It is therefore theoretically possible that your password could be stored. I do not think this is the case, but I also don't want to take a chance, so I send my bids directly from my wallet by simply clicking the the down arrow to the right of my Steem Dollars and choosing the transfer link. (put your URL in the memo field). I might be a little bit paranoid, but I really don't like to take chances with my hard earned SBD.

Disclaimer -- I am still very new to Steemit and have plenty to learn myself!

As in this lesson just learned from @grumpycat -- Don't bid on bots that bid on posts more than 3 days old. Grumpy will seek you out and take a chunk of SBD back from you and all the curators!

I really hope you found this article to be useful and informative. If so, please upvote me so I can continue to create these detailed documents. Resteeming is a true vote of support. :)

Update. This post has made it to the trending tab. It got there because I placed bids with the bid-bots. This of course is not meant to be a secret, it is the point of this article. HOWEVER, I spent around 125 SBD and possibly more to accomplish this, so the payout you see are not without costs. Grumpy cat also removed a chunk of SBD from the total as well. And of course the curators (all who vote on the article get 25%). I will actually let you know the exact amount spent and returned when this post closes.

I believe this article has realized a nice ROI and I also believe it is also educational and very much worth promoting. But it only worked because I had sufficient funds to get the fire started and It was, in my opinion a quality and informative article to begin with. Again, promoting junk is not likely to yield positive results.

OF NOTE. 02/15/18 -- I just checked each of the 4 articles above this one in the Steemit:Trending -- and ALL of them used bid-bots.

Invest wisely for the future.

@bycoleman
https://ColemanAir.us
Craig