Steemit 101- The Vote Bots- What are they, Why use them, How to use.

On my last Steemit help/advice post I wrote a lot of the questions were about the Vote Bots, So I will elaborate more about them here.

Essentially these services all cast a vote on your post, that is generally worth more than the price you pay for the vote. Very rarely you may not receive as much as you send, but don't be worried. The two other really positive things I noticed about using these was that my reputation rose rapidly, especially when my reputation was very low. I'm not sure how important the reputation score is, but it's a great bonus.

The other positive thing I noticed was once your post is worth a bit more other users are more likely to check it out and also vote. This is just a cognitive bias working in your favor and it works. People are more likely to open the post if it's already worth $1-2, then sitting there at a couple cents.

You can also use these services to send vote to your friends as well, and of course that's the nice thing to do.

To send your payment you need to navigate to you wallet screen and select transfer from the menu for you Steem Dollars. (They will also accept STEEM, but these are much more valuable and considered the same to the bots, so you get much more benefit using steem dollars)

The second step is just filling in the options on the transfer screen. (This is the same way to can send steem dollars to other users, if your the benevolent type)
Your account name is automatically populated.
Type the name of the service you want to use (Be sure to have the spelling correct, since if you send to the wrong account you will not get a refund)
Type the amount you want to send.
Use the memo field to paste the link for your post that you want to be upvoted.

The 5 big services are @MinnowBooster, @Booster, @Randowhale, @BellyRub and @Discordia.

There are also some smaller bots like @lovejuice, @nettybot

@minnowbooster
This is a great service since you can never loose. They always send you a vote worth approximately 1.5-2x the amount you send. There is also a limit of 1SBD/day and 5SBD/week.

@randowhale
This service will send you a 1-5% Upvote for a flat fee of 0.5SBD. At 1% you will get only slightly more than your initial investment back, but at 5%, You will receive approximately 2.5SBD vote. These votes occur instantly. Randowhale has been offering special bonuses as well and taking naps (going offline) recently so double check the profile if you didn't receive a vote, of course it's best to use after it wakes from it's naps if you time it right.

I will provide the full vote value for the next services at the time of this post as determined from steemnow, It can help to decide how much to vote.

@booster ($94.93-100% vote value)
This is a bidding vote bot. It calculates all the bids over a 2.4hr period then casts the votes to all the voters according the the weight. @booster's vote carries alot of weight and people often bid quite high and can get very impressive votes. I would not suggest using this if you are not sending at least 2SBD, or even more.
They explain it like this: Ex: @Axe & @Bob both bid for the same voting batch. If @Axe bids 4 SBD and @Bob bids 2 SBD, @Axe will get 66.66% and @Bob 33% etc.

@bellyrub ($21.85-100% vote value)
This is also a vote bot, and calculates the same way as booster. It can be used effectively with smaller payments as low as 0.1SBD (I Recommend 0.5-1SBD)

@discordia ($4.42-100% vote value)
This is also a vote bot, and calculates the same way as booster. It can be used effectively with smaller payments as low as 0.1SBD (I Recommend 0.2-1SBD)

@lovejuice ($1.79-100% vote value)
This is a vote bot, but instead of have 2.4hr period it votes every 96 minutes. It's voting power is much lower, but it also recommends smaller bids of 0.1-0.2SBD (This is a great service for very small/new users)

@nettybot ($2.43-100% vote value)
This is a vote bot that is similar to lovejuice above, again it votes every 1.2hrs, with a lower voting power, once again recommending smaller bids of 0.1-0.2SBD. (This is a great service for very small/new users)

Hope this helps everyone and make sense for everyone, please feel free to ask any follow up questions and I will continue to try to help.