The complete newbies guide to curation rewards

Like many who are new to Steem once my account was activated I logged on and was keen to give it a try. I noticed early on that there was an upvote button and I figured it was much like the ‘like’ button on Facebook where you show people you appreciate their post. After a couple of days of reading I started to learn more about the curation rewards on Steem and how they work. I hope what I found can help other newbies to Steem in understanding how curation rewards work on
Steem

The key difference to Facebook is that the upvotes on Steem reward users with actual money (Steem power and SBD). Thats all good and well so cant you just upvote everything that you find of value then?? NO! Each Steem user has Steem power which contributes to how much weight their upvote has and therefore how much rewards will be gained. You can check your Steempower at Steemd.com/yourusername. Your Steem power also diminishes 2% each time you upvote someones post. The golden rule seems to be to not let your voting power get below 80% (which means voting a maximum of 10 times per day). This is because that below that your votes become worth a lot less and then you won’t be getting as much curation rewards. So if your voting power gets below 80% (mine got to about 30% before I realised this!) you are best to go easy on the voting and wait for your Steem power to regenerate. Some people decide to buy steem on the market and convert to steem power as shortcut (but you can build it up yourself it is just more of a long slog!l)

So when you upvote an article some of the overall payout goes to the author and some goes to the curators. Within the first 15 minutes that the article is posted 99% of the payout goes to the author. Between 15 to 30 minutes 50% goes to the author and the other 50% is shared between the curators. After 30 minutes all the rewards go to the curators!

Obviously you want to upvote articles that you think will make the most money - and thus provide you with the most curation rewards. It is a general consensus that the best time to upvote is between 15 - 30 minutes after the post is posted (unless you see an article after 30 minutes with great value but few upvotes - this rarely happens on Steem!). There doesn't seem like a lot of point upvoting before 15 minutes if you want a slice of the curation pie as all your curation reward will go to the author. Although there is no direct benefit of resteeming articles it makes sense to resteem articles if you have upvoted them so that they get more exposure and the possibility of more upvotes which means your curation rewards will be higher.

Sources - Youtube.

If this has helped please upvote (within the first 30 minutes of posting 😂), follow and resteem.