Great Steemit Tools and Resources for Minnows and Whales Alike

I'm taking a little break from my usual science and history posts to share some of the great steemit related resources I've discovered in my four months on steemit. They include sites that monitor statistics about your steemit blog and usage, curation groups, upvote bots, and more! A big part of gaining success on steemit is finding tools to help make your experience easier to manage and provide you with more options. If I missed any tools or services you'd recommend, please post it in the comments!

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First off, in a category all its own, the Minnow Support Project. Several of the services and tools mentioned below were created or supported by the Minnow Support Project, who definitely deserve a hand of applause.

Statistics:
These tools are fantastic for figuring out who is looking at your posts, upvoting them, and sharing them, as well as for seeing how much interaction you get from your followers.

• Mentionator: Mentionator is one of the many, many excellent services offered by @minnowsupport. It lets you know who has tagged you in their comments and posts. Free users can see the three most recent mentions of themselves, while paid users can see all mentions of themselves from the past 14 days. 
• Steemd: Steemd is a pretty handy collector of metrics about your account, it's well worth a look. I don't use it quite so often these days, preferring some of the other tools on this list. The link goes to my account's steemd page, just replace my username in the url with yours.
• Steemdb: Steemdb is Steemd's more useful younger brother. It offers a better organized and larger range of data about yourself with a much more pleasing interface. You can get information about your recent activity, who has recently followed or reblogged you, and much, much more. I use this one quite a bit! The link goes to my account's steemdb page, just replace my username in the url with yours.
• Steem Spectacles: Without a question my most used steem statistics site. Check out your most loyal followers, your ghost followers, your most powerful followers, recent upvotes received, and more! @spectacles made a great tool here!

Curation and Steem Support Groups:
These are all great resources for both finding and supporting great curated content, so that you don't have to wade through all the spam and terrible posts littering steemit, and so that your great posts can get noticed!

• OCD: This fantastic curation group founded by @acidyo relentlessly trawls steemit for high quality content created by minnows who haven't made it big yet! They were one of the first groups to notice one of my posts, and I've discovered plenty of the people I follow on steemit through them. They've got over 20 dedicated curators, and are definitely worth checking out.
• The Unmentionables: Not the biggest group on steemit, but one of the most supportive! @unmentionable, founded by @fatpandadesign, is a group that anyone is welcome to join. Via their discord channel and steemit account they provide advice and support for minnows, post promotion, great conversation, and a daily curation post of the best of their members' posts that comes with a nice upvote for the chosen posts. One of their best features is that in order to post anything in their post promotion section, you first have to upvote and comment on two other members' posts in that section, and each person can only post one item per day there.
• SteemSTEM: SteemSTEM is absolutely dedicated to encouraging and supporting high quality STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) posts on steemit. They feature dedicated curators, upvoters, and an exceptionally dedicated community, and have provided many minnows with tons of support.  Along with their actual account, check out their fantastic tag as well as their steemit.chat channel! Some of the consistently highest quality posts I've found anywhere are featured under their tag.
• Qurator: @qurator seems a little like an upvote bot at first- you send them a 2 SBD fee, they upvote you. Once you send that fee, however, they'll be upvoting you for life. Here's the catch, though- they review everyone who applies first, and only accepts applicants who regularly produce high quality content. Spammers or people who simply don't produce good content are refunded their 2 SBD and not allowed to join. They also provide a great community and support via their discord channel, and are steadily expanding their services, including the creation of an upvote bot just for members as well as curation of all member posts.
• Steem Voter: Steem Voter lets you automatically upvote the posts of people you follow or think deserve your support. It's a handy service, especially when you know you'll be off steemit for a while.

Non-Upvote Bot Signal Boosting:
Sometimes you want a way to make your posts more visible without using an upvote bot.

• Resteemit: @resteemable resteems your post and gives you an upvote, and only asks for an entirely optional donation in return. 

Spam Fighting:

• @commentwealth: CommentWealth is an account dedicated towards both fighting comment spam and encouraging high quality comments on steemit posts. Their core ideal is that healthy interaction between users is the best way to grow community and fight spam.
• @cheetah: This fantastic bot hunts plagiarizers across steemit, tagging them wherever they appear. Why not stop by and give her an upvote? Steemit was founded by @anyx, who also deserves a witness vote for all the good work they do for steemit!
• @steemcleaners: Downvotes and otherwise fights spammers and other users who violate the steemit terms of service or otherwise abuse the site. Stop by and give them an upvote as well for all the great work they do!
• @originalworks: You should always tag @originalworks in a comment on your own posts- they check to see if your post is original, then give you an upvote and a certification of authenticity on it as well. If you're concerned that someone else is producing plagiarized content, Original Works is worth tagging in a comment on their post as well.

Upvote Bots:
I've recently stopped using upvote bots for the most part since I hit 500 SBD, and I do wish they weren't necessary- but they are a fact of steemit, and they can help minnows quite a bit. 

• @minnowbooster: The best upvote bot out there, bar none. Guaranteed profit and visibility boost. A Minnow Support Project tool.
• @booster: Pretty decent bidding upvote bot.
• @bellyrub: Another good bidding upvote bot. Another Minnow Support Project tool.
• @discordia: Little baby bidding upvote bot, good for minnows without much SBD. Another Minnow Support Project tool.
• @minnowhelper: Yet another bidding upvote bot.
• @buildawhale: There really isn't an end to the bidding upvote bots.
• @treeplanter: Upvote bot whose revenues all go to a reforestation project in Cameroon. This one is my personal favorite and the one I still plan on using regularly, not least because they don't currently allow self-voting.

In an upcoming future post, I plan on giving out a few tidbits of steemit advice I've learned since I started, but for the immediate future, I'll be going back to science and history posts, as well as taking another vacation from steemit for Thanksgiving week.