After roaming in the background for a while and taking in as much as I could from some of the best content on Steemit, I had an idea that may allow small minnows like me to actually make some money through curation.

I use to believe that curation was a lucrative game ONLY for the big fish. But I think with the method I am going to outline, there is a way to actually make money EVEN IF you don't have a lot of steempower.

Curation is Though - Get Smart About the Game

Being a good curator is a tough game. It's not easy to hangout all day long in the "new" section to pick up the next big hit...but it is possible.

For anyone who doesn't know the rope of curating, here are 2 articles I suggest anyone to read:

Part 1 - The Ultimate Guide to Voting Power
Part 2 - Announcement: All votes will be up to 8 times more powerful in new hard fork!

The Strategy - Smart Curation as a Service for Whales

Here is the situation that many whales have:

1- They need to vote to maximize their earnings
2- They do not have the time or expertise to spend all day curating
3- They are not interested in vote bots and actually want good curation to occur.
4- They would happily part with a small fraction of their earnings if someone did it for them.

So How Can You Solve Their Problem for a Profit?

There is this really cool service called Streemian that allows you to connect your profile and then allow you to either follow a trail or become a trail operator.

What you want is to become a really good trail operator. Basically, you start working on become good at curating.

You can find out how you rank in the last 7 days as a curator here. Your rankings on this page essentially becomes your business card as a professional curator.

After 7 days, if you are in the top 100, you can start approaching people on steemit.chat (the whales in the top 100 in SP that is) and ask them if they are interesting in following your curation trail. In my opinion, there are not much reasons for them to say no since you are selling them on making more money via curation.

Since you are the one voting before them, you can get a few million SP backing EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR VOTES. Can you smell the bacon already?

Limits

At some points it becomes uneconomical for someone to follow your trail when you have 30-40 people behind you since they are voting one after another...still, this is money sitting on the table since no one (or almost no one) is doing that.

Conclusion

I believe this is one of the best way to have better curation happening on Steemit. It's better to have whales voting more than voting less in order to get the distribution of steem to as much users as possible. I am curious to hear your feedback on this.