I am writing this after researching the like-profit ratio of different blog post. Now I could be totally wrong, but examine profiles that follow a hundred people and look at the ones that follow thousands and you will see it adds up.
When I first joined I saw these posts with 40 likes and they were getting around $40, and I thought "Dang I could do that easily". This is where I made my first mistake, I started following everyone. That way I would get more followers, and with more followers comes more likes. And more likes = more money right? WRONG! Because by following 7,000 people I raised an interesting little number in my steemit profile called "New Average Bandwidth". And this variable goes up whenever you do anything on this site. Whether you follow someone, unfollow someone, write a post, comment on a post, etc.. My New Average Bandwidth is sitting around 2 trillion right now, which is WAY to high. If you want to check out your stats go to this website but fill in your username: https://steemd.com/@username
I believe that the reason I only made $0.66 on a post that got 78 likes is because I have such a high bandwidth and steemit is deducting money from my account to pay for the bandwidth I used. It isn't a bad business plan, but I really screwed my account because now I have to make enough money to pay back all the bandwith I wasted. So my word to the people reading this, only follow people you really really like, because for every amount of bandwidth you use you are cutting into your profits.