If you really want to earn a high curation reward, you must be the first person to upvote!
Is it really that simple?
Yes basically that’s all you have to do!

If it is that simple, why is not everyone earning big time?

That’s also simple, because there can only be 1 person the first to upvote each post.
And of course there are a few other things that you need to keep in mind. Like giving the first upvote after 1 or even 2 minutes, that won’t really give you any curation reward. And if in the end your upvote turns out to be the only one, there is no curation (besides the amount you get from your own upvote)

Where to find these posts or authors?

This is were it gets a bit difficult. The easy part is where you won’t find these kind of posts. And that’s by following the most popular Steemonians. Cause do you really think that you will ever find a post from #jerrybanfield that does not have any upvote after 10 minutes?

I have at least 4 strategies that you could use:

1 Use paid upvotes

If you check the wallets of paid upvotes, you can easily determine which posts will receive an upvote. So you can at least be sure about the fact that you are not the only one to upvote a certain post. But it can take quite some time to find a post without any upvotes. So I quite often choose to upvote as number 2-5.

2 search via the new votes tag

This really contains numerous posts without upvotes. But the big question is if these will ever get any valueable upvote once you were the first one to upvote. So this might become a lottery.
But in this lottery you can try to buy some better tickets. Upvote Steemonians with a higher reputation. Or choose for certain tages like Utopian-io and Dmania.

3 Cheating

To my opinion those are not allowed. And although it seems kind of difficult to come up with a plan to use curation for cheating tactics. There will always be people that try to do so, as they see dollar biljets waiting for them. Or at least they hope to end up with profit.
Starting your own curation trail and finding lots of people auto voting behind you seems a tactic one can try. And all those autovoters think they follow you because you curate great quality posts.

4 Copy a winning strategy

In Holland we usually say “better steal a good idea then come up with your own terrible idea”. So have a look at my strategy and be my guest to steal it!