Upvoting Services, Bots, and More
Recently I wrote a post about powering up in which I mentioned that turning SBD into STEEM POWER turns you from a blogger, to a crypto investor.
Today, I am going over ways you can invest your SBD which will most likely help you multiply your SBD. I say most likely, because all of these methods are gambles.
One of these services is free and other services start at as little as $0.05 SBD.
Vote Buying Clubs
In vote buying clubs, you send a fixed amount of SBD or STEEM to a service, and they in turn, upvote every single one of your posts forever and ever until their system stops being a system.
@steembasicincome is a popular one and @upv4life is another.
Both give me about a penny per share on each of my posts.
Your investment here is minimal, 1 SBD or 1 STEEM depending on the system.
This is how you would sign up for a membership to @upv4life
The picture below is of a steem wallet. Click on the steem dollars, and click on transfer.
Fill out the transfer to account form
.
Click on the next button, enter your password, and buy yourself a membership.
Dust Cleaning Services
This service is brand new and I absolutely love it, they have already upvoted me twice. @dustsweeper
This service takes all of your dust votes (explained here), and gives them an upvote so that they reach the payout threshold. With this service, you get a payout EVERY time you receive an upvote.
This is a pay-per-use service, and I got started by sending them 1 SBD.
Free Upvoting Services
I only know of one of these services and you can find them @minnowsupport. They have a bot, which gives you upvotes every 48 hours. This service is free, and only costs your time. You must join them on discord to receive the upvotes.
I have received upvotes of $0.07-$0.19 from them. They vary.
Manual or Micro Up-Voting Services
You transfer SBD to a service through your wallet and they respond sometime before post payout with an UpVote. These services are great, but I haven't found so many of them, and the amount of SBD they accept is small.
My favorite is @thundercurator as he gives a 300% upvote, but I also like @flagstaff and @bumper. These are manual curation services, they actually visit your account and make sure that its not spam.
You must be patient when using these services because they sometimes take a while to upvote you.
Up-Voting Services
Don't mistake upvoting services for re-steeming services, they are different. Re-steeming services are like advertising. Up-Voting services are designed to leave you a profit.
Two services I like to use are @smartmarket and @minnowbooster.
They each have a website, and you go to their site, you see how many votes are available, and then you send them SBD. They in turn upvote your post. Sometimes they don't have enough upvotes available and they give you a refund.
This is what the minnow booster chart looks like. You can see the current one at here. This one is pretty straight forward. You see how many SBD you can send, and how many upvotes are available at that amount. There are other people using the system at the same time, and I don't know how often the chart is updated. I do know that if they don't give you an upvote, they give you a refund.
You have to do some math when using these services.
The Basic Equation: (SBD Invested < SBD and SP received at payout).
The factors include, price of SBD when you buy the service vs price of SBD when payout occurs, how many people are using the system, how much the service is paying to obtain their STEEM, and other market factors.
Bid-Bot Services
When you hear Steemians complaining about vote-buying, this is the monster that they are referring to. Most other services, pay enough attention to your posts to make sure that they are "quality," which I have noticed basically means, its not plagiarized and contains more than one picture and a sentence.
With these services, you basically bid for upvotes. Sometimes you receive a large percentage vote for a small amount of SBD and make a profit. Sometimes, you bid for upvotes at the same time as too many people and you lost some of your profit. There is no limit to how many different services you can use to upvote your posts.
If you have enough SBD you can keep your posts in the trending pages this way.
I have never used these services, because I don't understand how this practice is profitable to the bidder. It seems like too much of a gambit to me.
Conclusion
Figuring out how to make these services profitable is part of the puzzle to figure out, and not many people will blog about it and tell you their secrets.
I lost about $15 SBD learning to use these systems. I lost the money by not knowing what I was doing, sending SBD to the wrong wallets, and watching profits disappear when the price of steem went down.
I have also made enough SBD to keep buying upvotes, and my Steem Power has increased significantly faster.
These services are just a little boost and are not strong enough to help you grow if you don't have readers who are also supporting your work. Steemit is a social media place, and the only way for you to guarantee growth is to build a community and grow together.
Are there any other services available that I didn't go over? Please share them in the comment.
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I have been on steemit for some months now and I have not really learnt about these upvoting services. I had to save this post and reread it like twice to understand really well. I even wrote down some notes.
Thanks for explaining it so well. I will go forward to use some of those you mentioned. I honestly appreciate this post. Thanks!
Questions tho:
Whats the meaning of SMT? I read it like twice in your replies
Also how does one get a discord address that you haven't been given
And how can I link a previous post to a present post like you did by just writing 'here' because I usually copy the address and paste on a new post. Thanks
Thank you for stopping by. SMT's are Smart Media Tokens. From what I understand, communities on steemit will be able to create their own coins backed by the steem blockchain. This will enable communities to pool resources together and create their own currency within the blockchain.
I do not know how it will work.
Discord is not connected to steemit or steem, it is a service that many of us prefer to use. You get your own address when you sign up. You find communities by finding their links which are usually embedded in their banners or next to their avatar.
If you want to link something you use [inside here go the words you want to use](inside here you put the link you want people to follow).
This has been very helpful, thanks for making me understand @metzli 🙂
Very helpful.
While I knew some of this, I also learned something new :)
Happy it was helpful.
Yet again, another useful post from you on upvoting services and introducing a whole lot of them. I use some of them too like minnowbooster and smart market sometimes, dustsweeper and Minnowsupport. I am sure it is very helpful to all of us who are still learning the various upvoting services on this platform, especially coming from someone who has gone and try them out. Thanks @metzli! 😉
You're welcome. I think that bots will be going out of style when the SMT's get started and I look forward to that change.
Thank you for his helpful piece of work. I just started using services, but as these upvotes gained me around $2-3, I couldn't find these gains in my wallet. Takes some time or you just don't receive the amount you receive from upvotes made on your content? :)
You still have to wait until payout to see your rewards, that's why I called it an investment, and that's why using the services are not a sure bet. You have to remember the some of that income (roughly 25%) goes to the curators, which is why you need to do some math before investing.
Still, when your account goes from making 0.00 to more than that, its exciting.
Because so many of your posts receive upvotes, but minimal payouts, I would suggest you begin using @dustsweeper so that the posts that you don't use voting services on, still receive payouts.
Bots are the reason why steem is not flying high, because the value of our upvotes is made fake by those bots. I'm against it.
I read about this sentiment a lot, and I also read the re-buttels.
I was such a purist that I even stopped using @originalworks, back when it still paid you a penny or two to post because I didn't want to ruin steemit.
Then I started reading charts and graphs by steemians like @penguinpablo and found that less than 1.5% of votes are made using bots. The rest of them are made by regular accounts. I don't know how he tracks that and I don't know if community accounts, and services like @steembasicincome (which has been deemed "good" by the community that uses it) are included there.
I do know this, bots are we know them are not sustainable for the people who run the bots. The value of SBD has to stay at a certain way for it to be profitable. Also, there are SMT's coming, that will also make the bots less profitable again.
These bots won't be around for long. Im using them while I can, but understand why other people are against them.
Thanks so much, this really help, I will try some of the services
You’re welcome. Hope they work out well for you.
Yay, another awesome post! Thanks for writing this @metzli!!
You’re welcome!
Nice work! I'm travelling right now, but I'm bookmarking this article so I can go back through it more thoroughly when I get home. I definitely need to be doing something more proactive. Thanks so much for putting this together!