Outsourcing your upvotes is an easy way to earn here on SteemIt. But be careful not to drain your voting power
Outsourcing Your Upvotes
On SteemIt you can find loads of ways to outsource your upvoting. If you don't have enough time to upvote posts manually, or if you always seem to pick the wrong posts and don't earn any curation rewards, these services can be a big help.
Some examples:
You can join Smartsteem and sell your votes.
If you join Streemian you can follow curation trails, which mains that you can sign up for a trail of an experienced voter and vote on the posts he (or she ) votes.
You can sign up for Steemvoter and/or SteemDunk to automatically upvote the authors of your choice.
When you join Steemfollower, you are expected to upvote 5 posts every day. By doing so, your post will be shown on the website, and you will receive votes in return.
These are just a few sites you can use to automate your upvoting - many more are available.
And of course there's nothing wrong with using these services... provided you use them wisely.
Keep An Eye On Your Voting Power
Since you can upvote only 20 posts a day, you shouldn’t overdo it. With every upvote, whether it is a manual upvote or an automated upvote, you give away a little of your voting power (2% to be exact).
The vote of a minnow at 100% voting power is worth only a couple of cents. If you reduce your power to 50%, it will be worth almost nothing.
If you overuse the services mentioned above, you'll eventually reach a moment when there is no point in giving someone a manual upvote because you like his article, simply because you don't have enough voting power to reward the author.
Regenerating Your Voting Power
You can check your voting power at https://steemd.com/@yourusername or at SteemNow!
At [SteemNow](https://steemnow.com/) replace the name in the top right box with your own username and click 'Save'.
A bar will appear in the center of the screen. It'll show you how much voting power you have left and how long it will take to reach 100% again.
In normal circumstances, you voting power regenerates at a rate of around 20% per day.
But... those automatic services are not going to wait until your back at 100%, they'll just keep on voting. As a result, your voting power will never go up completely, so you’ll never be able to vote at 100%.
I Speak From Experience
I speak from experience: I set up up only one curation trail at Streemian , automated upvoting for my favorite author using Steemvoter and allowed Smartsteem to sell my votes. Also, I frequently voted through SteemFollower.
And of course I also upvoted posts manually almost every day.
Now, I'm at a point where my voting power never goes back over 80%, which has a big impact on the value of my votes.
Let me show you my voting power bar:
To get my voting power back to 100%, I am not able to upvote a single post for 45 hours... I'm on SteemIt every day...!
Now, I disabled most of the services, trying to get that VP slider closer to 100%. Once I get there, I'll be able to re-activitate some of those auto-upvoting uptions again.
In the article Voting Power 101 by @scrooger he recommends to keep your voting power above 80% for optimal curation rewards.
(I really recommend you read this article - @scrooger found an original way of explaining how voting power works.)
But when you're using automated voting services, you need to make sure they're not draining too much of you voting power. If they do, you need to make some adjustments to make sure you stay above 80% - if you don't, you might end up like me: all frustrated and poor.
The Importance Of Upvoting Manually
For me, the manual voting part is the most important; you get to read entire articles that may contain valuable information, and you can discover promising new and older authors that are worth following.
After all, this is a social media platform, not an auto-vote-and-then-forget-about-it platform. In the long run, authenticity will be rewarded, even if the money you get from upvoting manually is a bit lower.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t outsource your upvoting, but I advice you to work smart, so when a fantastic post passes you by, you’ll still be able to give it the manual reward it deserves.
Do you outsource your upvoting? Or do you prefer to vote manually? I'm curious, so please let me know which one you prefer, and why.
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