@calamus056 right advice at the right time. You should probably also ask steemians to stop upvoting their own comments !. Any upvoting on their own post ( blog or comment) should be desisted upon.
I think I follow all your guidelines except perhaps looking up now & then to see how much is the payout for my post :)
I also won't be using the voting bots in exchange of a few $. I have done it once for my last post but can't decide whether it is right to buy upvote or not.
I have registered with steemvoters. But not added any authors there nor set my rules. Steemvoters will automatically upvote certain authors after exactly a certain amount of time (20-30 min after posting). So this does not warrant that you read the post, instead upvote automatically and strategically to maximize the curator rewards.
With the voting bots and automatic upvoting websites the rules of engagement changes.
Do you have any advise for newbies on those aspects. ?