RE: Adventures in running a Steem based business
Heh, this post is probably the closest I have to such a thing: https://steemit.com/steemit/@cryptomancer/steem-voter-review-bringing-bot-power-to-the-masses
In general, I try to keep my voting power around 80%. I've tweaked my voting rules over time, and continuously refine them to keep voting power hovering around that ideal target. I have a healthy mix of authors that I support because I genuinely enjoy reading their content, and authors that are big moneymakers and hence provide high curation rewards. So I don't curate only to make money, if I wanted to do that I could probably optimize my rules a lot more.
One strategy I have is to check my history of curation reward payouts at the end of each week. I will scan the list to see which authors are consistently giving me the least payouts for that week, and add them to my "amber" list. Authors on my amber list get watched closely, and I will actively play with rule timings and try to improve the curation performance. If these authors don't show improvement over the course of a few weeks, then they get dropped from my rules. So it's kind of a survival of the fittest sort of thing. I give new authors a fair chance but won't support them forever if they don't live up to expectations.
I also try to do a fair bit of manual curating whenever I can, so make sure that the Steemvoter rules leave me with a bit leftover voting power to use on that.
I remember reading that post when you first wrote it. I tried to use the one post per day author rule as a good guideline to follow but in my attempts to support friends and people who have helped me along the way, that rule has fallen by the wayside.
I should probably keep a closer watch on my voting power, but I don't. I manually vote whenever something catches my eye and rely on Steemvoter to remove the constant pressure of feeling like I have to find material to vote on or catch the authors I like at just the right time. Signing up for Steemvoter has been a huge relief. I wish I had done it sooner.