Continuing my series on external sites that plug into Steemit to improve you experience, the immediate benefit of SteemAuto is not entirely obvious but stick with me and we will find the benefits together.

When you first visit https://steemauto.com you can login by using SteemConnect - which will connect your Steemit account to SteemAuto allowing SteemAuto access but it still can't act without your approval first. Once connected you can tell SteemAuto what you would like it to do on your behalf, and just as quickly stop it. It's entirely safe and you do not need to worry about anything happening to your Steemit account - SteemConnect is used by many external services and is very highly regarded as a safe and easy way for apps to plug into Steemit.

Once you are connected to SteemAuto you have three options available, Curation Trail, Fan Base and Scheduled Posts. I will cover these in order.

Curation Trail allows you to follow the existing trails of other users. The premise of this is the users on offer here are upvoting specific users and posts that will give the greatest creation rewards - and they time the upvotes as well to further maximise the rewards. When you follow any of the users on this list you will ghost their upvotes - that is when they upvote a post you will also upvote it. You can tweak the settings, so if you follower one of the users you can adjust your upvote percentage to whatever you choose, and also choose how long after they upvote that you upvote. Default is 100% upvote at the same time as the user you follow. The Upvote you give away is very dependant on how much upvote you have available - and how much you upvote through Steemit while browsing posts. Upvote timing is key, you can read many blog posts on Steemit about the perfect timing to upvote a post for maximum creation rewards - here we assume the user follow is getting it spot on - but you can add a delay if you think - or want to find out - it will improve on it.

I trialed this feature for a few weeks, and to be perfectly honest all it did was drain my upvote down to 25% while providing nothing amazing as far as curation rewards. I then turned it off and I am still trying to regain my upvote power because I'm still upvoting on Steemit myself and my own daily upvotes seem to be about the same as the recharge level. So I would be cautious with this, and play around with the settings to reduce your losses while finding out if you is giving you anything back.

Fan Base however for me is a very useful feature - but I use it in a particular way that suits me. So initially it shows you a list of top people to follow. You can follow these if you like, when you do it will automatically upvote every post they make for you. The theory is if you follow posters who consistently have high reward blogs, you will take a curation share in the high rewards.

For me though, the most useful part of this feature is that you can put any Steemit users account name in and then follow them and auto upvote their posts. So I input my favourite Steemit users, the ones whose posts I know I always like, the ones who always take the time to comment on my posts - and even the odd people I come across and who post great content but just don't get the rewards they deserve from it. And then I am always supporting them, because as Steemit is growing, I'm following more people and of course with time zones around the world to consider - the chances are when I do get chance to view my feed I only see a tiny fraction of the posts made by people I like the work of. So then I would have to spend even more time specifically looking for my favourite posters, to view their vlogs and upvote and comment on their posts. This way I always upvote their work, and using steemd.com I can scroll through what I have upvoted and then head over and post a reply at my leisure.

As with the Curation Trail you can tweak the % upvote for each user and the time after the post has been submitted to upvote to further improve your own curation rewards. For me this feature is solid gold, and for an entirely free service you have to give the creator @mahdiyari a follow and upvote his own posts. Personally you need to make the effort to go and comment on the upvoted posts - I have found my comments give far more reward then any of the curation - maybe I'm doing it wrong but at the end of the day a comment on a post shows someone you read it, cared about it and took time to consider and answer to their work. It means alot to me when people comment, so I do my best to return the favour.

Finally we have Scheduled Posts - I have not used this yet but it is a very useful feature. If you can't post for a period of time for whatever reason - you can create posts and schedule them here to be posted at a set period of time. For example if you try to post every day - but will be away for a week when you can not post at all - You can create a weeks worth of posts (I haven't tried it so don't flame me if this is not true) and schedule to post day after day just like if you did them each day as normal.

To conclude, from my previous posts https://steemit.com/steemit/@c0ff33a/rise-of-the-bots-are-your-steemit-posts-giving-you-the-rewards-you-deserve about the upvote bots, and also https://steemit.com/steemit/@c0ff33a/do-you-want-more-upvotes-and-followers-for-free-this-is-how-i-did-it the SteemFollower service just making a blog post on Steemit is a tiny part of getting rewards from your posts - and from the posts of your other fellow Steemians. I work quite hard on my posts, but it actually takes me more time now making use of every service I have found to push my posts and give it greater rewards. You can see what I use and how much I invest on a post by scrolling through my wallet.

If you enjoyed my post don’t forget to leave an Upvote, feel free to comment on what you liked or where I can do better even. Follow @c0ff33a for regular and varied posts, photography, my weekly VLOG, posts on coffee roasting and brewing - just follow and see.

JoinSteamfollower and get upvotes in return for upvotes
https://steemfollower.com/?r=158
It’s free, simple, easy to find new content to upvote and get your own content seen by more users and possibly upvoted.

My Dash Wallet
dash:Xqjemfc9gEmrnXQ7KPdADmNpdpncMHB47C
My Bitcoin Wallet
bitcoin:1G7psTXjKV3URkF7sLprgQrcv9Ar9HoPap

Feel free to help me fill them if you have any spare crypto currency you would like to share ;-)

For more upvotes and content sharing join the GuideSteemit team https://steemit.com/steemit/@guidesteemit/guidesteemit-voting-bot-for-1-month-join-our-channel-you-will-get-more-information

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All photos are my own, taken with my iPhone. All my steemit posted pictures can be freely used by other Steemit users in their own blog posts - all I ask is that you follow me and credit @c0ff33a linking to my post you took it from.

!steemitworldmap 53.766547 lat -1.801500 long Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. d3scr