Welcome to steemit. I see that you joined through anonsteem, It is going to be a rough road to get started in steemit. One of the first things you should look into is @dustsweeper. It is not a bot, more of a bank system, most votes you receive early on are going to be dust level votes, meaning they just go away, like they never happened.
The other tool that I have found useful on steemit is steemworld.org. It was created by and is still being tweaked and updated all the time by @steemchiller. Your page would be here: https://steemworld.org/@taylorchronicles Very easy to read an use tool, and lets you know when people mention you in a post or a comment.
Your VOTE is your vote, please do not take this as me telling you how to vote, this is just a few facts of voting life on steemit.
Self vote your post is most like not a waste of a vote, others will usually upvote it. I would however prior to upvoting your own post wait until it reaches a payout of at least $0.030. If you vote for your post and it does not reach that level of payout, you pretty much lost that vote, it gets dusted and goes poof into the steemit ether.
Self voting your own comments until your vote value is more than $0.020 is like lighting fire to a dollar bill, it just goes up in smoke, because people will rarely upvote a comment that has been upvoted by the commenter. This does not happen all the time but in a lot of cases it does.
To maximize your vote power and retention of visitor, you will have to find a balance between upvoting blog content you like and comment on, and upvoting those that comment on your post. There are a lot of strategies involved in voting. If you vote on a comment someone leaves on your post, most likely that comment vote is going to be burned up, unless they have a @dustsweeper account. So if your vote is the only one it will like be burned up/dusted off, and that will mean no curation reward, an unfortunate fact of a voters life on steemit. You want to keep visitors coming back, but you do not want to have all your votes being burned up, or you will never make progress. Pick one or two of the best comments and vote those ones. This will leave you seven votes to vote on other people's content.
When you get to about 80SP, you no longer really have to worry to much about bandwidth issues, and your vote will be a solid $0.010 or more. Try to limit your voting to only 10 to 12 votes a day at most. Take a look at your steemworld page and see when you will be back to 100%, try not to sleep on 100% vote power, i try to vote enough so that when I wake up and sign on steemit I am at about 98% vote power.
Please read a couple of the @dustsweeper account post, and the comments, you will see how valuable a tool it is, especially helping with the small votes. If you have any questions I will try to answer them.