I wrote Discussing the factors that drive Steem's curation rewards back in June. Also, that article has a link to The Ultimate Guide to Voting Power (with cartoons, formulas, and code references!), which was written by @biophil in 2016. Maybe those will help.

Oversimplifying, the way it works is that 50% of every post goes to the author and the other 50% gets split among all the different voters, but it doesn't get split evenly. In general, the earlier voters and the voters with the largest stakes get bigger shares of the rewards (except that you generally don't want to vote on posts in the first 5 minutes because there's a voting penalty during that time in order to slow down the bots).

So, as a voter, your goal is to vote on posts that you think will eventually become valuable, but do it before they receive any large upvotes. Right now, voting on well-written posts in the diary game before @steemcurator01 or any other large voters do is probably a decent voting strategy. Or maybe check the "New" section in Project HOPE for well-written posts that haven't received big votes yet.

The other thing that's important is to make sure that you vote numerous times every day, at least 10 full-power votes per day. You can monitor your voting power on steemdb.io/@openmindedtravel, and you never want that to sit idle at 100% for very long (or at all).

Bots is a more complicated topic, and I don't really know what options are out there. I've written some of my own, but they're not really suitable for general use. I'd suggest exploring the site https://auto.steemdb.online/, but I'm honestly not very familiar with what's available. Maybe someone else can provide some more insights.

Hope that helps!