Last week I decided to hit the promote button on every single blog entry I made and spent $10.00 SBD to boost each post. These are the results of my post-promotion experiment:

Results from One Week of Promotion

Blog Entry	Promotion (SBD)	Total Rewards	Author Rewards
1. Is Government a Moral Necessity?	10	118.32	95.19
2. Ask Me Why I'm Here (Charity Post)	10	2.03	1.79
3. Another Day in the Life of an Anarchist	10	0.82	0.78
4. Why do Women like Men in Uniform	10	38.86	29.53
5. What I Learned as a Prisoner in a State Indoctrination Camp	10	115.85	89.60
6. A Question for the Alt-Right - Who Are the Real "Cucks"?	10	9.78	7.51
Total	60	285.66	224.40
Income (promotion subtracted)	164.40

Or for anyone who is more visual-minded, here is a bar graph:

The numbers in the x-axis correspond to the articles listed in the table. 

Observations

While I did make a decent profit overall, half of the blog posts saw a loss. Two of those had a substantial loss—greater than 80%. 

I think the posts that were successful would have done moderately well with or without any promotion. However, I don't think users like @dantheman would have noticed them and given them such a substantial bump if they weren't listed under the Promoted tab. 

Results from All of My Steemit Promotions

My week-long experiment wasn't my first foray into promotion. I had promoted several articles before last week. Here are the results of my complete experience with Steemit promotion:

Blog Entry	Promotion (SBD)	Total Rewards	Author Rewards
1. Steemit has Changed the Way I Think	1	3.10	2.32
2. My Looney Tunes Inspired Animated Short	10	191.14	143.72
3. No, Vaginismus is Not a Harry Potter Spell	5	417.59	333.03
4. Was 9/11 an Inside Job?	10	17.38	14.01
5. Is Government a Moral Necessity?	10	118.32	95.19
6. Ask Me Why I'm Here (Charity Post)	10	2.03	1.79
7. Another Day in the Life of an Anarchist	10	0.82	0.78
8. Why do Women like Men in Uniform	10	38.86	29.53
9. What I Learned as a Prisoner in a State Indoctrination Camp	10	115.85	89.60
10. A Question for the Alt-Right - Who Are the Real "Cucks"?	10	9.78	7.51
Total	86	914.87	717.48
Income (promotion subtracted)	631.48

And as before, here is a bar graph for those more visual-minded Steemians. 

This next graph splits my promoted articles into two ranges of time. Time Range 1 represents all of the articles I've ever promoted, and Time Range 2 represents my week-long promotion experiment.

Observations

Before my promotion experiment, all of my promoted articles saw a profit. Some small, some massive; but profit nonetheless.

Like I said earlier, I think some of these blog entries might have been successful with or without any promotion, but the fact that they were promoted may have been what drew the attention of whales like @smooth and @dantheman. 

Conclusion

Will I continue to promote my posts? 

That's the question. Given my results, I think promotion can help to draw the attention of whales to posts that would have otherwise only found moderate success. But promotion won't do much for entries that don't have very much viral potential to begin with. 

If and when I write a blog entry that I have a lot of confidence in, I may consider hitting the Promote button once again, hoping that I can get that $100 or so boost from a whale. Otherwise, I'll just continue posting the old fashioned way and hope that my followers and other random Steemit users stumble upon my work.

I mean, hey, this is still a platform where some random guy like me can make $10 for what was basically no more than a tweet.

I usually wait an hour or so before spending any money on promotion just to see if the post will do well on its own. I don't know if that's a good or bad idea... but that's my strategy right now. Just for fun, maybe I'll throw $5 SBD at this post and see what happens.

Disclaimer

Don't take anything that I'm saying as advice. This is simply my own experience with promotion, and honestly, I can't truly know if my positive results had anything to do with the post-promotion... not unless @dantheman, @xendal and @smooth come forward and say, "Yes, I did find your article under the promoted tab."

~Seth