What I Use to Climb Up The Steemit Ladder

Again, a post which might not be much use to exclusive WordPress users. But hey, if you’re having success here, maybe you will have success on Steemit.

Here is a list of things I have recently found useful on Steemit, as well as a few old ones.

SmartSteem: I used SmartSteem for a while without knowing it’s full potential, I even wrote a post about it a little while back. Smartsteem is great for increasing your Steem Power as well as getting a few more SBD’s out of your posts. But it’s good for more than just that. You can delegate some of your SP to the bot and share in the profits from it. You can also sell your votes and not only will SmartSteem pay you, you will get curation awards as well. It’s not a ton of money but a steady trickle is better than nothing.

Minnowbooster: again this is one I have used for awhile. They also provide a delegation service and a place to sell your votes. I’ve never been disappointed with them.

@bubblebee: this is one of those services that sends you a transfer saying “use my service!” and promises a bunch of great things. In this case it promises 50+ upvotes in exchange for 0.5 SBD. I was skeptical about it but after using it a few times it has definitely delivered. You won’t get 0.5 SBD worth of votes, but you definitely will get 50. I reserve this one for times when I want to get somewhere close to the trending pages.

@haji: another one of the spammy kinda users. I got way more votes out of it than @bubblebee as well as some resteems, but not the 1 SBD I sent to it. Again, great for trending.

Steembulls discord channel: this channel offers an upvote exchange. Vote for the post above you then post your link. Pretty simple way to get at least one vote. Plus you get to meet some other people, and networking is key on Steemit. @Steembulls is a great community for meeting other Steemians. I do warn you though, don’t get too post happy. I posted more than the limit of one per 12 hours and got cut off. They were gracious enough to let me back in when I groveled a bit.

Busy.org: How do I describe busy? Well, like the name it is a bit busier than steemit.com in terms of layout. But it gives the advantage of allowing you to create a footer to go on all your posts and allows you to auto-upvote your post when you post it. I haven’t found much more of an advantage than that honestly. It’s still worth checking out.

Steepshot: Steepshot is a great place to post photos and art. There is a great community there and since it displays just photos it’s great for visibility. Even though it limits your description to a short paragraph, it gives you the ability to use up to 20 tags instead of just 5. I highly recommend this if you are a photographer or artist.

I hope these are useful to you. Keep checking back for my disclaimer on vote buying. It’s going to be a douzy.

Just How Smart Is “SmartSteem”?

SmartSteem logo used by permission.

This may not be of interest to my WordPress followers, but anyone who is on Steemit should find this valuable.

A few weeks ago I realized I had not won a @photocontests contest in awhile. I thought maybe it was due to my use of SmartSteem to promote my posts. Then I noticed that @juliank, the sponsor of the contests, also uses it on occasion.

It turns out my photography is just crappy.

But it got me wondering, if someone as huge as @juliank uses it, it must be profitable, right?

I never actually did any calculating, I just took @smartsteem ‘s word for it that if you send them any amount you will earn 180%-216% (15% ROI) of that amount (after 25% curation).

So I decided to do an experiment. I decided to keep track of a week’s worth of my posts. I would spend various amounts on each post and see what the payouts ultimately were.

I made a spreadsheet for all the info and calculations and entered in the data once the votes stopped rolling in. Then I reran the numbers once the payouts occured. Most of the time they changed because of the fluctuating value of Steem Backed Dollars (SBD).

Method:

As soon as I made a post I upvoted it. Then I visited SteemBotTracker.com and used the SmartMarket bot to purchase votes.

I then waited for the votes to stop rolling in, or for the refund to come back. SmartSteem returns whatever it can’t spend on votes. I would then subtract the refunds from the amount spent to calculate how much I actually spent.

I did have to re-enter my bid on a few occasions. I only did this if the returned amount was 80% or more of the total amount allocated.

I then recorded the reward in SBD, subtracting my upvote amount from the total, since that would be there ordinarily.

I didn’t break down the votes by whether they were from SmartSteem voters (you can find out from your SmartSteem profile) or organic votes. I assumed the organic votes were harvested from the exposure from the SmartSteem votes. This may not always be the case, but for this experiment I made that assumption.

I also recorded the Steem Power rewards. It was not possible to calculate a rate of return for these since I only spent SBD and not STEEM in this experiment. I converted the amount of SP into SBD at the end just to see what difference it made and it made quite a bit of difference.

Overall I spent $39.203 SBD with an initial return of $38.914 SBD and 11.37 SP.

Results:

Actual return in SBD was $29.934. This was a 23.64% loss.

SP return was 10.246. I converted this to SBD (1.39 SP/SBD) and found the equivalent return to be $14.27 SBD.

Adding the total return of SP and SBD gave an ROI of 12.77% ($14.21 SBD). Given that SmartSteem has a flexible ROI I would call this close enough to the 15% usually quoted.

Pros of SmartSteem:

Easy to use, just go to https://smartsteem.com or https://steembottracker.com/ or send Steem or SBD through a transfer.

Gains user post exposure by getting posts into “trending” or “hot” categories.

Gains user followers.

It’s easy to keep track of votes and their total value on the SmartSteem site.

Great customer service through their Discord Channel. The few times I have had issues with refunds, @TheRealWolf has been more than willing to help.

You can buy upvotes for any post, even if they are not yours. This allows you to do a little undercover charity work for smaller minnows or people working for a cause.

Cons:

If you are hoping for a positive return just in SBD you will be disappointed (unless SBD value is on the rise). I think this very thing is the reason SmartSteem has had some negative press lately. The guy spreading the slams doesn’t understand how the returns work.

Sometimes you have to send your bid a couple times to get it through. This is more of an inconvenience than anything else.

Conclusion:

While my SBD return was a loss, overall return was a gain when one considers SP as well.

SBD dropped in value 24% from the first post to the last payout. This definitely had a negative impact on the results. In fact it lines up exactly with the difference between initial returns and actual returns.

SmartSteem is definitely not a get rich quick scheme. Like anything on Steemit it takes patience and time. It does however offer an easy way to snowball returns for quicker results. You don’t have to buddy up to some whale anymore for decent payouts on your posts.

Overall, SmartSteem is an easy to use tool to gain Steem Power, SBD, and followers. It is a great way for minnows to grow into dolphins and whales quicker than simply waiting for the system that is Steemit to find them.

If you want to get in on the action and give me a little bit of credit, use my link to join: https://smartsteem.com?r=driptorchpress

Thanks for reading!

Making Money Like A Millennial: Steemit Part 2

Last week I talked about Steemit and offered a couple of tips to help you succeed. I ran out of space so I decided to spread out the tips into a second post.

Here are the tips that I left out of the last post:

Discord Groups:

Want something more confusing than Steemit? Get Discord. Discord is a chat app which supports text and speech. It’s mostly used by gamers but there are quite a few Steemit related channels on there. Once you get the hang of them they are actually kinda cool and easy to use.

Some of my favorites include:

Peace, Abundance, and Liberty, this is probably the biggest Discord channel for Steemit users. It includes over a dozen chat rooms about topics from poetry to photography to sports to rap battles. Like all the others I will mention here, it includes a “post promotion” room just to post links to your blogs in. Unlike the others it also has three upvote bots you can register with and use simple commands to get a couple extra votes.

Minnowbooster, this is not nearly as extensive as PAL, but it has a post promotion room. It also has information about using the @minnowbooster upvote bot.

TPot, not sure why I like this one so much, it might be the logo. It’s a bit more cozy and intimate than the rest.

World Of Photography, this is the Discord group for participants in @photocontests.

What else? Oh yeah. Register with @ginabot. “She” can update you every time you get an upvote or a resteem and every time you get a wallet transfer. Very helpful!

Steemstats:

Steemstats is a great page which will allow you to keep track of your voting power, your incoming votes, your upcoming rewards, as well as all of those things for any other Steemit user.

Which brings me to this tip: keep an eye on your voting power. Don’t go voting for everything on your feed. If it gets too low your votes won’t be worth much and your curation rewards will suffer. I like to keep mine above 80% if possible.

SteemAuto:

SteemAuto is a tool for more experienced Steemit users. If you use it incorrectly you could end up harming your account. So be cautious.

With SteemAuto you can create a “fan base” of people you will automatically upvote every time they post. You can even set upvotes for every time they comment. You can see how this can lead to a draining of your voting power, so use it wisely.

You can also schedule posts to post up to 100 hours later. This is helpful if you are going to be away from your phone or computer and you want to make sure you get a post up in time for things such as contests.

Another helpful feature of SteemAuto is automatic reward collection. This handy tool collects your rewards for you so you don’t have to check your wallet 30 times a day like I used to!

There are other tools on there that I have not yet explored, but I imagine they are as helpful as the rest.

Steem Dollar Ticker:

This handy site is great for calculating just how much your wallet is worth at any given moment. While your wallet tells you the total value, it doesn’t allow you to tell individually what each section is worth. This tool helps you do that.

SteemBotTracker:

This is another tool I would urge caution with. As of writing this I’m running a bit of an experiment to see if it’s really helpful. If used wisely, I think this tool could be very helpful to new Steemians to gain them some quick traction towards Dolphinhood. If used poorly, one could lose their shirt.

I’ll post more about this next week when I see the results.

Other Fun Stuff:

Steem Pacman: This gives you Steem for playing the classic Pacman game. Last time I tried it I didn’t get my reward, but it’s fun so check it out. They promise more games are coming.

Earncrypto: This is one of those “do things, earn money” kind of sites. You can set it to give you many different types of cryptocurrencies. I have mine set to Steem and I just run videos all night.

Coinmarketcap: This site will give you the prices of all cryptos, very handy.

I’m sure there are other tips and things that will come to mind after I post this, but I think these should keep people busy for awhile.

Anything Steem/crypto related that you use? Post it in the comments!