Growing your account ethically

The other day @ocd curators picked up one of my posts and I've been whitelisted and eligible for post promotion service with @ocdb. This is really nice as being curated is the only way to get whitelisted with @ocd (consider voting for @ocd-witness if you want to support their work).

So yesterday and today I have submitted a couple of my posts for post promotion and started to think deeper about this.

@ocdb distributes the profits back to the community and the author always gets at least 10 percent more than the bid amount.

I also wrote a post about the future of fundraising in which I argue that Steem could easily become the place were non-profits could raise some funds for their causes. For example, $1000 USD. In today's Steem prices, this would be around 2439 Steem.

I like this amount because it gives me something to work with. It's not in millions so the number is really achievable. And it's not a few dollars which wouldn't be a significant cause.

So this prompted me to do some calculations. Don't take them literally, the amounts are purely for the sake of argument. Each author's payout will inevitably vary.

Let's start with some assuptions. First the author will publish at least 4 posts a day. Is it too much? Too little? I don't know. My average is 4.71 posts per day. Also a person will need to make 10 thoughtful comments on other people's posts a day and upvote these posts. This is certainly a lot of work. But again, your cause is worth it, right?

So when you first start posting on Steem, your rewards might be very small. I remember my first post received $0.02 USD. In today's prices minus curation that's around 0.036 STEEM.

That's a start, right? If you publish 4 such posts per day, after a week your posts will generate $0.08 USD. A quarter of it will go to curators, meaning the people who upvoted your posts. So your real profit would be $0.06 USD per day after one week. In current prices of $0.41 for 1 STEEM that's about 0.146 STEEM.

Now remember, if you selected 50/50 reward option on your posts, then half of this amount will come as Steem Power. And we don't want to touch it. Let it grow your account.

But the other half can be used for promotion with @ocdb, provided you will get whitelisted. For this to happen you have to keep creativing really valuable original content. Content that other people might enjoy.

If you have a non-profit that you're trying to raise funds for, you can easily write about your daily actions connected with this non-profit. This would surely be worthy of @ocd's attention.

So anyway, back to doing some math.

Let's say, your every post is earning you 0.036 STEEM which returns to you one week later as 0.018 SP and the same amount worth of STEEM but in liquid SBD which you can convert on the internal market to STEEM. Of course @ocdb accepts SBD too but it's easier to do the math if we deal with just one currency.

So with each post you can send 0.018 STEEM 4 times a day and a week later will get 10 percent more. That's around 0.019 times 4 and equals 0.079 STEEM.

If you keep publishing 4 times a day and keep sending STEEM for @ocdb, then on week 3 you will have 0.086 STEEM daily.

Now of course all these rewards are too small to even bother for growing your account.

But what I would do (and this is not a financial advise, just my personal plan if I had to start from scratch) is to invest some STEEM and use it for promotion. I would buy 815 STEEM (that's $334 USD right now). I would buy @ocdb's upvotes for 10 STEEM 4 times a day. After a week this would be 280 STEEM.

Every week I would raise the amount with the payout returned from the week before. It wouldn't take many weeks to raise 2439 STEEM this way.

Of course without any investment it would take a lot longer but after investing $334 USD, I would reach my goal much faster.

What would you do if you wanted to grow your account ethically?