Hey, SP is what makes your voting power go up. Steem is what's traded on exchanges, as is SBD. The more SP you have, the stronger your voting power dollar wise. The author and curation rewards you get are in Steem and SBD. I personally convert all of my Steem to SP right away but the SBD you actually want to save and then sell on the market. SBD is actually worth around $10 right now while Steem is worth roughly $3.25. So, that means if you sell your SBD you can get roughly 3+ Steem for each. Then, you can power up that Steem converting it into SP if you want, thus gaining more voting power and higher rewards.

Just so you know, once you power up to SP, it will take 13 weeks to power it down again. It pieces it back to you little by little over that period. If you have no real interest in selling it, then that doesn't matter. You might as well take advantage of the higher voting power/higher rewards. The goal is to get at least around 500SP which will get you a slider on your voting power. That enables you to vote in percentages so you don't burn all of your voting power up in 10 votes. That's why you'll see lots of people vote with smaller percentages.

You can go to https://steemit.com/steemit/@scrooger/why-you-should-not-convert-your-sbd-to-steem-you-really-shouldn-t-you-are-losing-money for a post from someone who will go over what I just said.

And you can go to https://steemnow.com/@ryansatterlee to see the "stats" on your account and what your voting power looks like.

You can also type in my name @dagger212 and see my stats. Or whoever else you might want to look at. Very useful tool. In fact, I bookmarked steemnow in my browser so I can look at it every day.

Oh, one last thing, you can buy Steem on Bittrex and transfer it over. That's how I got the majority of my SP. I bought it over there, transferred it in, and then converted (powered up) to SP. I happen to think it's a great long-term investment so I have no problem holding it in SP. If you choose to do that, like I said above, the goal is to try and get at least 500 but it all helps.

While I'm at it, I'll point out that your voting power is down around 10%. That means even your 100% upvotes aren't paying people anything. You want to try and keep that above 70% if possible. You can watch it move if you check it before and after you vote. There's a "clock" in the bar graph showing how "full" your voting power is. It will tell you how long it's going to take to recharge back to 100%. You've got 107hrs to wait until its full, assuming you don't vote anymore between now and then. Like I said, you want to pay attention to it and try and keep it above 70% if possible.

Anyway, those are a few answers for you. You can read through the Explore and FAQ pages (and a few more) to get more answers. You can also just use the search function above to see if you can find what you're looking for.