Why

          We vote on content or comment to show that we appreciated the work and the effort that went into preparing the content or to say thank you for the comment a person left. (At least that is how I vote). To begin with - - - Do not take this as me how to vote or use your vote. I am a 100% believer in that it is your vote and your right to do with it as you please.

          This post is mostly aimed at the new user, to help them learn how to effectively use their vote and grow their reputation on steemit generically.

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Tools

          There are a few tools that will help you with your voting in steemit. I will introduce them first, then go into some of my personal style of voting. The first tool, and likely one f the first tools any new user finds on teemit is steemd. A companion program to steemit, created by @roadscape, that allows you a quick view of your account information. Here is a picture of what steemd looks like:

         

is what controls how much your vote is worth. You need at least 80 SP before your vote is worth $0.01. The blue bar is an indicator of how much of your vote power you have used up. It takes about 2 hours to recover 1 percent of your vote power. Steemd does not show when the power will be recovered. So let me introduce you to steemworld.org by @steemchiller:

          As you can see you get a lot of vote information available to you right away in an easy to view and read format. The power wheel, shows just how much voting you have done, to the right of the power wheel is how much your vote is worth value wise at those percentages. Down in the body of the report how SP you have how much you have received, and how much you have delegated. The VP with the arrow is how long until your vote power reaches back to 100%.

          Both tools are different and both tools have their purpose and both tools are indispensable to you when you start getting into steemit. Your steemd account would be: https://steemd.com/@yourname and your steemworld account would be https://steemworld.org/@yourname, just substitute @yourname with your steemit @ name.

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The Vote

          As mentioned above you need at least 80SP before your vote is worth $0.010. Recently I learned about vote dust level. This is the price point a vote needs to reach before it will convert to a payout figure. Any vote or group of votes that do not reach above the $0.019 vote level will not count toward giving nor receiving of a reward.

          Does this mean my vote is totally useless until I have 80SP. Absolutely not. The only way to grow your account and to gain rewards is to receive votes. The only way to get votes is to be seen. One way to be seen is via comments. I am sure you are like me and would like to know that at least one real person saw your content and left a real comment. Most people are of that mindset. When you see they not only left a comment but a vote also, how did you feel? Felt good I would bet, I still, after almost one year feel good about getting a vote and a comment it is like double the fun to receive both.
          Even though your vote is worth very little if anything at all it still lets the person that received your vote know you appreciated the work they did, and if your vote is on their content, then it will like give you a curation reward. If you are a repeat customer of their, (you visited more than once to their blog), then they may take a look at your content. Speaking of your content, you want people to come back and be repeat customers of yours, so keep that in mind when they leave a comment on your content.
          Now there are a couple of ways to look at your comments and what to do. You have very few votes, and you want to grow your SP, and to do that you need to get rewards, so you need to make every vote count. Failure to reward a customer of yours is going to result in a potentially dissatisfied customer. You can vote on their comment and hope they have an @dustsweeper account, ( I will cover that toward the end), or you can let them know you appreciate their comment, if you just leave their comment hanging out to dry, they likely will think, that you did not care about the vote or the comment and they may not be back. Even though it is a potential loss in vote reward I am one of those that believe a vote should be given to at least one or two comments that you receive on your post. It lets the person who commented and voted on your page know you cared, and it shows future visitors to your pages that yes you do sometimes vote on the comments received.
          You must still be careful about commenting on other peoples post, some of them can be pretty childish or downright asshatish about comments without a vote. If you get something like "What good enough to comment on but not vote on" type of comments, just politely respond back, that you had no vote power left, and that you will no longer darken their door with your visits to what you thought was a wonderful post" or something like that, there are after all a lot of people with content to read enjoy and vote and comment on. Comments drive people to your post. Commenting on other peoples post is the best way to get people to look at your post, but you need to vote on their content or they may just view you as a comment spammer looking for votes, so give the content you like a vote.
         

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How to maximize your Vote

          Maximizing your vote. You want to do that as much as possible. People will look and see what your voting habits are. If you want to increase your Rep and Post payout, Self Voting is not going to help very much in the beginning of you steemit career. Prior to self voting your post or a comment you made, make sure it is past the dustvote level and has reached a payout level of at least $0.030. Why do I say three cents when the dust level is .019 cents? The price of steem fluctuates, it could go down, play it safe you do not want to throw that vote away.

          You want to keep your vote level up over the mid 80% range if possible at 80% it will take a full 24 hours before you are close to maximum vote power. Try to go into your sleep period or your next time frame visit to steemit to be where you are not sitting at 100% vote power, that is wasted vote potential. I myself try to time my vote recovery period to be at the 97% level for when I next visit steemit. That give me about three hours to get up to speed so to speak then I start to vote. Steemworld helps a lot with figuring this out.
          Once again speaking of steemworld, learn to use the manual vote slider in the tools section when you finally get to 80SP. Why wait til the 80SP level? A couple of reasons, it will show people that you are here to take steemit serious, and that you want to not only maximize your vote potential but you also want to maximize your engagement level with fellow steemians. When you get to 80SP learn to use that slider, or one of the other sliders that are available. Slide down to 50% range for your voting. Prior to 80% you were less than a penny people knew this, they still know this. By setting at 50% you show that you are trying to be responsible with your voting. You likely noticed that you did not get any curation rewards until you reached almost 40SP., that is about when you started to get those $0.001 curation rewards. If you drop your slider to far you will miss out on those rewards, it does not matter what slider you use. Staying at 50% power on your votes will allow you to vote for twice the number of people or pieces of content than you were able to before and still get a curation reward.

          Now for @dustsweeper, and to start wrapping this up. @dustsweeper is a program that was developed by @davemccoy and @danielsaori, to aid the new user in gaining some traction on steemit. It takes all of those dustlevel votes you receive and lifts them out of the dust and into the payout pan. You will see on some comments and post something similar to this:

This post protected by @dustsweeper

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          The poster is letting you know if you are aware of the program that yes your vote will count, and you will likely get a curation reward, and if a person does not understand what it means, they are likely to ask about it, and thus the word is spread. this is not a vote bot, you do not pay it to come and vote on a one time post. You set a savings type account up with them by making a deposit of at minimum of $0.050, (I believe that is the low side amount but it may be less). You want to try and build your savings to at least 1 SBD, at 1 SBD you will have about 70 votes lifted from out of the dust. Here is the FAQ page for dustsweeper, I urge you to take a visit and see what they are all about.

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The Quick form for TL;DR

1. Build your SP to 80.
2. Only vote 10-11 times a day initially
3. At 80SP Learn to use a slider and do not slide less than 50% until you get to 210 SP (edit: You get the steemit vote slider at about 500SP, prior to that you need to find an alternative slider, steemworld.org, and busy.org both have early sliders available).
4. Watch your recharge time.
5. Don't self vote your content or post until it reaches a payout of at least $0.030
6. Get Steemd, steemworld, and most important dustsweeper.
7. Vote on at least two people that comment on your post.
8. Return a comment on most of the comments you receive. (nice post that sort of thing, can be ignored).
9. It is your vote!!! Use it as you see fit.
   If you want to sell buy or trade your vote that is your business, all I was trying to do is let you know a little bit about one strategy for generic steemit growth.

I have not grown fast, and I maybe could have done better, but there will always be someone doing better than you and someone doing not as well as you. Some vote strategies will work for some, some will work for others.

As always if you have any questions I will try to answer them or suggest where you may be able to find the answer. I do not know anything about curation trail voting so for that information you will need to find an expert. I like to vote, and I love to comment, to me the two are inseparable, so I maintain control of my own voting, instead of letting some trail or committee vote for me.