Source
When I joined steemit, I randomly upvoted any post I liked, with the mind set that curators got paid 25%... heck yeah!! This kept me going. After a few days I saw 0.001sp as my curation reward and I thought I must have been doing something wrong.
Turns out there was more to it. Maximum curation awards are recieved when a post is 30 mins to 1 hr old, again with this little information I went on an upvote rampage (lol), I took to the hot page, upvoting everything just above 30 minutes, I got carried away, until I spent 80% of my voting power and was optimistic about the rewards!
Well... nothing came still... not even another 0.001. I found out that curation rewards are paid according to steem power and voting weight, interesting because my sp is a lowly 15 and my voting weight is somewhere around 0.01. So bottom line I have to invest in increasing my steem power.
I realized recently that it pays better to upvote fellow minnows who don't get lots of votes... yeah bro, you youngster looking for curation rewards... upvote posts like these... there's less competition
What am I saying??
If you're a young fish like me still feeding on phytoplanktons and zoo planktons, upvote post that you like of other minnows between 20-45 minutes to get maximum curation rewards... Steem happy my friends