It therefore begs the question... What to do with it?
A good bit of advice is to learn how to use power responsibly first
Those of us that have been around here a while have made our mistakes and learned through trial and much error what many new users are just discovering.
Voting power is a finite resource and must be used wisely.
In July last year when my vote was suddenly worth a couple of $ after being just worth 0.00 the first thing I did was spam votes everywhere... back than that wasn't so irresponsible because we had 40 max votes a day.
Now its different, we only have 10 max votes per day.
There are a lot of places you can see your vote power.
They can be found by dropping down the hamburger menu.
and checking out the steemit app center.
or just go too http://steemtools.com/
There are many many steemit apps to explore.
The ones I use the most are (swop the @yourusername with your steemit user name):
https://steemd.com/@yourusername
https://steemdb.com/@yourusername
That's the precise way to manage your voting power, by watching it decline as you vote.
Or you could just have fun and enjoy voting without too much thought and when you see it isn't giving that much by way of rewards, take a break for a couple of hours.
There are a few do's and don'ts
These are not written into the software but its common etiquette.
We can just vote for what we like... when we like... and that is fine too... that's one strategy and one of the least complicated.
vote for your own posts, that cool.
vote for your friends and people you follow, that's cool.
vote for strangers and new users, that's cool.
vote for content you like, that's cool.
vote for comments, that's cool.
vote up your comments, a little, to give them visibility, that's cool.
vote only for your own comments, that's not cool
Steemit will work best when everybody is spreading the love around and not just voting for themselves.
Make friends, have fun and if you want more influence and a more powerful vote... buy steem and power up.
At the moment, at these prices, it looks like around 1000 steem power gives out roughly $1 when your voting power is fully charged.
Since its now linear, if you want to hand out $10 a shot that would take around 10 000 SP