Convert Steem Backed Dollars (SBD) to Steem Power for higher ranking on Steemit

One of the most confusing things about Steemit is how SBD vs Steem vs Steem Power all work together. I have been on Steemit for just over a week now (day 10! thanks for all the support a follows my Steemit fam!) and I still don’t REALLY have a great understanding of it, but I have watched a few videos and posts and I made my first step. Yesterday I saw a video post from @craig-grant about how Steem Power works (STEEM Power Tutorial, in the flow) and it was a good kickstart for me. Time to POWER UP!

It does not seem to be an easy task, but it is certainly a goal of mine for 2017. I realized that the first step I needed to take was to build my “Steem Power” up so I can raise my reputation. There are a few ways to do this, but I will just go over my experience to date. First off, I have not purchased any Steem, Steem Backed Dollars, or Steem Power. I decided to just use my curation rewards and the first step was to convert my SBD to Steem. There are quite a few options to convert your SBD to Steem, I decided to use the local Steemit marketplace to exchange my SBD for Steem. Click on the small arrow next to your Steem Dollars total to get the menu you see in the screenshot below.

I have no idea if the Steemit Market is the best place to do conversions like this, but it seemed like the easiest option to try first. As you can see I have a damn small amount of everything, just over 1 STEEM Dollar and this is what we will convert to STEEM (and eventually to STEEM POWER, its a 2 step process but you will see why it’s a good thing in a minute).

Here is the Steemit Market, its pretty basic. I just filled in the amount of STEEM Dollars I had and then how much I bid (you can see there is a lowest recent number, I used that) and it calculates based off these things. The transaction went smooth and I now converted my $1.156 of STEEM Dollars to .746 of plain old STEEM. Now that I have that STEEM I went back to the Wallet screen and clicked on the arrow next to my STEEM total and chose to “POWER UP!“.