First off I have to admit that I am not the best at curation. It seems there is a mixture of science, art and luck to upvoting on Steemit and I miss all three every time. I currently use Steemvoter for a few people and have played with percentages but still have not seen a lot in return on my curation attempts.

Well, I wanted to compare my short experience with manual curation and delegating my Steem Power to see if it worked for me. First up is manual curation.

The Curation w/ STEEM Power (SP) Way

This is the idea of upvoting posts and comments and earning a return off of each one. The curation payout you get from a post depends on the total amount the post earns in 7 days, at what point you placed your vote and the total amount of SP you have. My account is floating around 1000 SP and my votes at 100% add about 14 cents on a good day to a post.

I Upvoted ✅

I have spent time searching for posts and comments to upvote that I feel have value. I feel that I have done a good job of encouraging solid content and trying to be a part of the community. My curation reward for last week was 1.229 STEEM.

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This isn't bad and I haven't checked the exact voting amount I made but with all the factors that go into the curation reward I don't think it really matters. I would say I probably did 5 - 10 a day.

The Delegated STEEM Power (SP) Way

I decided that I wasn't doing a great job at managing my SP usage and although it stinks to click the cool spinning upvote icon and give just a few cents, I thought it would be a better long term strategy for me to delegate. I wrote about my first experience here and ended up earning a few STEEM just for letting someone else borrow my SP. So let me quickly explain the delegation concept.

How Loaning SP Works

• 📈 Your SP determines how much your vote is worth. The higher your amount of SP then the more powerful your vote in allocating payout to that post or comment. This makes it desirable to have more SP.
• 💸 You can loan your SP to other users on Steemit. SP also determines actions you can perform like upvotes, posts, comments and the system allows you to delegate your SP to others to help them if they do not have enough.
• 🤖 Minnowbooster facilitates this arrangement. This provides an opportunity for an escrow type service to add an incentive to this loan arrangement. If someone is paid in STEEM to delegate their SP to another user then they would be more likely to do it.
• 💰 Daily Payouts are given to lender over the length of the loan. Minnowbooster then divides the total amount paid to borrow the SP over the course of the loan and pays it out daily to the lender. Keep in mind the lender still owns the SP but is not able to use it.

Time to Delegate 😎

I used minnowbootser to delegate almost all of my SP minus around 100SP. I wasn't sure what to expect but the loans had a decent return and couldn't be worse than my curation.

I delegated 925 SP across 6 different orders pushing my usable SP to around 100. I quickly saw the voting slider disappear when upvoting content and the power of my vote dropped to about 2 cents. Now that this is complete I wait to see what happens.

Well... It turns out I got more in my first daily payout than I did for the whole week in curation rewards. 🎉

My daily payout for all 6 delegations is at 1.307 STEEM. The crazy thing is this is going to continue for the next 4 weeks!

It turns out that for me I am better off in a position where I can earn from loaning my STEEM vs using manual curation. I am not sure if this will change in the future but the delegation method is working so well that I can't see myself stopping yet.

The bottom line is this:

I earned 9.149 STEEM in 1 week by delegating my STEEM and only 1.229 STEEM by curating content myself.

How are you doing on curation rewards?

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