Should you be using an upvote bot? - an introduction guide for minnows

Hello Steemians!

If your like me you jumped straight into your Steemit account and started blogging away. After a few days you have started to realise that although you might think your posts are amazing they are getting lost in the amounts of other posts here on Steemit. I had noticed that some posts have auto generated comments saying their post had been upvoted by a bot so I decided to investigate.

At the most basic level bots are a way of helping us ‘minnows’ become more noticed in the Steem ecosystem. The idea is that you can send some of your SBD to a bot and they will then allocate a bot to upvote your post and thus making it visible to more people (and also increasing your reputation score).

Before we carry on I think I should talk about the ethics of this (because it is something that I have considered and Im sure others have too). Are bots ethical or are they just helping and encouraging people to write bad content? I think if you are like me and focused on writing good content then using a bot is a great way to get noticed - it can be nearly impossible to start off with otherwise!

I think minnows have 3 choices when it comes to building a following on Steem:

1. Invest in some Steem and add to my Steempower
2. Slowly build up reputation through networking and posting good content
3. Invest in a bot for upvoting
   I think a combination of the last 2 will work best for me (Im too poor to invest at the moment all my money is going towards travel!)

I have found the bot @minnowbooster which I really like and have had a try with.

Using the bot is super simple and I want to show my results of a recent post I used it for (and show you how to try it yourself!)

Firstly navigate to your wallet and hit the drop down menu next to your SBD and click on transfer

In the to box type in minnowbooster. Under the ammount type in the ammount you want to invest in having a specific post upvoted by minnowbooster - the minimum is 0.1 and the maximum per week is 5SBD (for this example I transfered 0.1SBD). Where it says memo you copy the link of the post you want minnowbooster to upvote.

After submitting I got a memo in my wallet almost instantly saying my post had been upvoted for 0.21… thats a good return.

I do think that this can help us minnows to get up and started but I dont think abusing the bots and using them is a great idea (remember everything on Steem is public so others can see when you have transferred to Minnowbooster!)

If you enjoyed this check out some of my other introduction posts for newbies to Steemit:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@conradt/the-complete-newbies-guide-to-curation-rewards

https://steemit.com/steemit/@conradt/things-i-wish-i-knew-when-i-joined-steemit

Thanks for reading I hope you found it valuable.