Self voting is fine when you do it as you described. I vote for my own material, but curate a large amount of content as well. Joe's practice is to only vote for himself. Before he turned his account into a voting bot he'd comment on all the hot and trending posts and upvote his comment (but not the post itself...). He then votes on his own posts. And never votes for another content creator.

Joe's approach to making money on Steemit is to focus on his account, and his account only. He has no community approach here.