Everyone wants a good curation reward by upvoting a good quality article or post.
Early curation effort
When I first started in steemit, I usually upvoted on quality articles that have high rewards which most members do.
Does high reward value of a post result in your high curation reward?
The brutal fact is ‘No!’.
The basic fact is that there are many contributing factors in gaining a good curation reward.
I did not manage to gain much curation reward simply looking at the value of the article since the reward of 25% will need to be proportion out based on the amount of steempower as well as the timing of your upvote after the post.
Low steem power is a hindrance to fast growth
Regardless of what many early steemit members said about you being able to grow your account into something bigger with great effort put in, the fact is that you will find yourself growing slowly even if you have been posting daily as well as commenting and building a great pool of followers.
Discouragement is not a friend after the time and effort put in to grow.
The deception of becoming a whale may be shattered after your great attempt for many months or even years.
You may see some who managed to grow speedily when compared to you but take a look at who are their supporters.
Some started out with a whale as a friend since they were invited by whales so naturally the whales will help them.
There are also some who managed to become friends with some whales after coming to this platform.
To speed up the growth, purchasing some steem power will accelerate everything and it also indicates a kind of commitment you have in steemit especially when steem price is low. Buying low steem price makes it more profitable even if you plan to sell it in future.
Even with high steem power does not always mean high value for your article if it is not of good quality actually. I do see authors who do not gain much upvotes even with high steem power. You should still research on how to write better articles by enhancing your content presentation.
With a higher steem power, you can have great power in upvote value which result in higher curation reward. With higher curation reward, you can grow your steem power even faster.
Spot the right author
The fact that popular authors have a large pool of supporters. Many of these supporters may be dolphins or even whales. Your upvote may not gain much if you have low steem power.
I personally may look for other emerging authors who may not necessary have many followers or dolphins but with some decent quality articles with reasonable article value. You will notice a difference with the curation reward once you can spot one.
With the present situation, you notice that most members are focusing on articles related to growth in steemit and cryptocurrency. I do not deny that there are good articles.
Curating quality posts of artists, video creators and audio creators
I have recently started supporting good artists in 
Without many members upvoting and a high value post, it is really an opportunity to gain greater curation reward without the fierce competition like the popular ones.
By doing so, we are supporting good artists as well as video creators to grow in steemit. Steemit is not really just about cryptocurrency alone. It aims to have a large variety of content.
To have a greater growth, it is important to dive into areas that not many members are exploring yet and you can reap the best opportunities through them. This is also the spirit of entrepreneurship.
Use of steemit tools
By identifying the right authors or artists to support, the fact is that you are not able to be at a computer to support them 24 hours a day.
You can consider using steemvoter or steemauto to help you to follow and upvote their posts.
In this way, you will not miss out any of their articles by having to auto-upvote their posts and visit to read and comment later.
I have also used steemvoter to support my steemit friends that I have made after joining few months.
In this way, I am able to regularly upvote the quality articles posted by my steemit friends and give them a bit of my support. By doing so, we are building a community of supporters for quality articles, artists and video creators.
Monitor your voting power regularly
There is a area that I have to constantly look out for is my Voting power.
It can be drained quite an extensive level and I will not want it to go below 80%.
I have recently decided to give my upvoting in steemvoter different breaks to regain my voting power.
For new members, every 100% vote weight is a deplete of 2% of your voting power. It takes slightly more than 2 hours just to recharge that one 100% vote that you make.
When you keep voting without maintaining a reasonable voting power, your vote becomes less value actually and your curation reward is also affected.
You can easily check your upvote value and voting power using the steemit tool www.steemnow.com
This is the end of my article and I hope you have gained some ideas about how to improve your curation effort more effectively.
Disclaimer: This is my personal reflection and I am not in any position to instruct anyone what they should do. I am not responsible for any action taken as a result of this post. My post can only be a reference for your further research and growth. By reading this post, you acknowledge and accept that. All images and pictures were taken from google images that are free from copyright under labelled for reuse.