The Benefit of Voting Bots
I am a big proponent and user of the various paid voting bots and services on the Steem platform. I think they provide a great service to minnows and new users by allowing us to get our posts out there and seen by more people and build our following.
Detractors of paid voting services say that it’s not right that people can buy upvotes and I can see where they are coming from. If people could buy $100+ of upvotes and get on the trending page then I would probably agree with them. Realistically though, if you use all of the upvote services currently available, you can maybe get around $20 max. This is enough to get your posts on the “hot” page for a while and get a little bit more visibility, but not all that much.
I think this is actually the perfect situation for Steem for two reasons:
- It provides a way for minnows and new users to get a little bit of attention for their posts. If the quality is not there then they won’t get far, but if the quality is there it can help grow followers by leaps and bounds.
- It encourages people to purchase and use STEEM and SBD. Steem is one of the only cryptocurrencies I’ve found that people actually use and most often that use is promoting their posts. This should be encouraged as much as possible to help grow the value of STEEM and the platform as a whole.
How to Use Voting Bots Effectively
So now that I’ve hopefully established that paid voting bots and services are a good thing, the question becomes how to use them effectively and profitably.
At first I somewhat randomly sent some SBD to the voting services I knew about and got varying results. I think this is what most people are currently doing. But after a while - once I really started to learn how things work - I realized that I could take a much more scientific approach.
I jumped into the Steem JS API and wrote a quick tool to monitor the status of the various voting bots and services so I could easily see when profitable opportunities were available. This allowed me to earn some great returns on my SBD investments. For example on my last post I was able to get a $5.47 upvote for $1 SBD from @boomerang!
Presenting the Steem Bot Tracker!
Finally, rather than just using the tool for myself, I spent some time making a somewhat presentable web page (which is not easy for me!) at http://www.steembottracker.com so that everyone else who is looking to promote their posts and grow their following, like me, can benefit.
The primary value - as you can see in the photo below - is that it tracks the status of 5 popular bid-based voting bots and highlights ones which are currently under-bid and nearing the end of the bidding cycle. It also suggests the max amount to bid in order to remain profitable. Using this method takes the luck out of using these services and allows you to capitalize on some great opportunities like the 447% return I was able to get with @boomerang on my last post.
The current version is just a quick-and-dirty implementation in order to get the tool out to everyone as soon as possible, but over time I hope to expand the site to be a comprehensive resource for new and even experienced Steemers to learn how to promote their work on Steem.
Please let me know what you think in the comments and let me know if there are any other good post promotion tools or services that you think I should add to the site!
Utopian Contributor Report
I am trying out Utopian.io and writing this as a Contributor Report. Utopian is a great new project by @elear. It is a site based on the Steem platform that aims to reward contributions to open source projects! Check out @elear's post to learn more: @elear/utopian-the-begin-of-a-new-shared-meritocratic-economy