Have I finally given up on powering my account? The reason why I'm no longer using bidbots

Image SourceIf you have been following me for some time now, you might have already noticed that my payouts are no longer the same as before. Months ago it was averaging at $25-$40+ per post but right now it's mostly at $2-$4 and on my lucky days $7. As you might have already guessed correctly the reason for this big drop was my use of bidbots.

Exactly one month ago, I've stopped the use of bidbots to promote my posts. The main reason for this was because of the disappointing price of Steem/SBD which resulted on the change of how payouts are being paid, right now it is currently the combination of SBD, Steem and SP.

As someone who values STEEM as more valuable than SBD, I hate the idea of using liquid STEEM to promote a post through a bidbot. My strategy in the past was to convert all the SBD payouts to Steem Power through the use of bidbots. In terms of profitability, I am definitely losing but since my main focus is to increase my Steem Power as quickly as possible I did not mind back then.

Truth be told, I believe that strategy worked pretty well as I have accumulated 360 natural SP as seen on my last monthly report without having the need to invest any real money on Steem. It's a slow grind but it worked. People might think that using bidbots is just a waste of time and pure selfishness, but for a plankton (soon to be a minnow) who had no support when I first started in here, increasing your visibility is the one thing you should prioritize after creating quality content.

Because some of my posts reached "Hot" and even "Trending" on some tags I had used, I have gained around 800+ followers and have caught the attention of some dolphins/orcas and even some whales who votes on my posts once in a blue moon which greatly helped me to breakeven some of my loses from using bidbots.

However right now, with the current reward payout in place and the price of STEEM fluctuating too much, I think that using bidbots is not very ideal. For reference, I'm gonna use this post from days ago.

Normally a vote from a bidbot is half of the amount you have sent it to, considering the post above with a potential payout of $12.55, that one will likely cost us around 6SBD if we use a bidbot (yes I'm being generous with the numbers right here). The Steemit interface tells us that for a 6SBD bid we would roughly get 1.65SBD and 3.56 STEEM, which when combined is more or less a bearable loss. However, we all know that the calculations above are far from the one that we would actually get. The closest tool as of now that is somewhat close to the potential payout is https://steem.supply.

From steem.supply, we see that for a $12.55 potential payout, we are only getting 1.239SBD and 2.879STEEM. If I would continue doing what I did months ago on a daily basis, I would surely ran out of liquid SBD and STEEM in no time.

My solution for this predicament was quite simple and one I have implemented exactly one month ago. Having heard great things about other steem platforms like eSteem and Steempress, I myself decided to try those two platforms out and have been lucky enought to receive some welcome votes during my first week of using them. Whenever I'm lucky(they upvote my post) I get around $3-$5 and on some unlucky days I am only getting $1.5 from my usual followers. Oh Well! What I can do? But it's definitely better than nothing. :)

However this might have caused some concerns on some people who have been constantly supporting me for some time now and have put me into their auto upvote list. For one, their curation rewards are not that anymore big (not sure if it was big to begin though XD) and also if I had lost my goal on achieving 1000 natural Steem Power before the year ends.

Nooooo! I am nowhere near thinking of giving up. My goal is still the same as when I first started, that is to achieve 1000 natural Steem Power before the year ends. With only 6-7 months left before the year ends, I am still somewhat positive that I can still achieve my goal.

My aim right now is to increase my daily guaranteed votes to at least $5. To do this I have been delegating most of my SP to communities that help content curators like @qurator, @jumbot, and @make-a-whale. This week, I have heard about @helpie but not exactly sure as how to get in on that group. (@meno can you help? lol). Oh well right now I had no choice but to rely on platform votes. :)