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Steem bot tracker is an application developed by @yabapmatt to help Steemians buy votes and monitor the available bots and their economic value. Many do not like the idea of buying votes. I once did not like the idea too until i found out the reality - almost everyone buy votes and it doesn't look like bad business (This is a personal opinion though). Before I dig deep into this, lets explain what bots are for minnows like me.

A voting bot is simply a Steemit account loaded with enough steempower that it can upvote quite a large number of posts. People own these bots and you pay them to receive upvote for your posts.

Some people on Steemit frown at paid votes because they believe it gets any posts to the trending pages and leaves real unique content struggling for visibility. While that may be true, its very difficult to pay your way to the trending pages. So in addition to paying for bots, you need to provide appealing content to get the crowd to upvote your post. That in addition to paid votes seem to help a lot of posts trend.

According to me, there are at least 2 reasons to buy votes

1. Buying votes help minnows like us to get little attention from the crowd. A minnow who makes good posts may end up discouraged if they did not get any attention or votes at all. So when they buy votes, minnows get consolation for their effort.

2. Steem is a cryptocurrency. People invest so much in cryptocurrencies. So buying votes give people the opportunity to invest in and use steem as a cryptocurrency.

Now that i have shown the reasons why buying votes is not a bad idea, lets see how to get the most out of paid votes.

Introducing steembottracker

Before you buy a vote, you need to know if that particular bot is worth investing in. That is where steembottracker comes in. This handy application enables bidders to know the profitability of each bot and compare it to other bots. It helps you know how to invest your hard-earned steem.

In this tutorial, i will explain (for the benefit of new-comers) how to use Steembottracker to buy a vote. Before you can use steembottracker to purchase a vote, you need to register an account on Steemconnect first. so assuming you have done that, lets go straight into how to buy votes using Steembottracker.

Step 1.

Go to https://steembottracker.com/

Step 2.

Click the "I understand" button to see the web page in full (See image below).

Step 3

Scroll to where you have the table of all available bots to buy votes from. I will expalin the meaning of some table headings as follows:

Bot name: Each bot is identified by a unique name. Remember, it is a Steemit account.
Vote value: This is the estimated amount you will earn after the bot upvoted your account.
Min Bid: This is the least amount accepted by the bot.
Max Age: Maximum age is how old your post is. Usually, most bots accept posts that are 3 - 6 days old
Send Bid: You click this button to initiate vote purchase

To start the vote purchase, click the "Send Bid" button for the selected bot. In the image below, i have selected to buy vote from minnowhelper

Step 4:

The next window shows where you will fill your details. Follow the instructions on the image below.

Step 5.

Step 6.

Step 7.

If you see the image above, it means you have successfully bought a vote. Wait a few minutes or even up to an hour to dependiing on how busy the bot was to reeceive the upvote.

How to check the upvote and vote value.

Step 1.

Open the post you bought the vote for. You can check for the change in estimated earnings and name of voters as illustrated below:

NOTE
Always check your earnings before the vote so that you can track the value of the pruchased vote.
In the example above, the initail earnings was 0.11. After the vote, the earnings increased to 0.26.

The Maths
Amount paid for the vote is 0.05SBD
Initial value of earnings is 0.11
After the vote, earnings increased to 0.26
Vote value = 0.26 - 0.11 = 0.16.
Profit made is: 0.16 - 0.05 = 0.11

Conclusion.

With this little value example, you can see that there was 0.11SBD profit made from the transaction. You get more when you buy a higher value vote.

So you have your choice to make. to buy or not buy bots is up to you. For me, its profitable business and thats why a lot of Steemians do it.

Caution.

Buying votes alone should not be you model of success here on steemit. Remember to increase your followers by creating quality content, making quality comments on others post, upvoting others post, joining various Steemit communities, Making and participating in contests, and ofcourse buying votes.

If this article helped you or your friend, consider resteeming it to increase its visibility. Thanks for sticking around till this point. Waiting for your comments now!!! Thanks.