Vote selling is a controversial topic. You may have come across people who do not approve the practice of selling votes. At the same time, there are people who actively sell their votes. I will share the reasons to sell your votes in this post so that you can decide whether to do it or not. This post will help you learn how to sell your vote on Steemit through automation-based vote selling services which do not require you to upvote manually.

Image designed via Canva.com and background image is free to use from the inbuilt gallery. MinnowBooster and SmartSteem images are used with permission.

The two popular vote selling services that exist on Steemit are MinnowBooster and SmartSteem. I have covered these services in detail already. However, these two guides contain extensive deliberation on each of the various features offered by them; resulting in more than 7000 words of content. I wanted to cover vote selling exclusively for my readers so that they can get focused knowledge about vote selling and how it works.

Why Sell Vote?

Steemit is based on Steem which is a cryptocurrency. If you have bought some Steem and powered up, it is your investment. Even if all your SP was generated from authorship and curation on Steemit, it is a reward for your investment in terms of your time and effort. Whatever SP you have in your wallet is your stake in the Steem blockchain. The way you use your stake/investment is up to you. There may be some use cases which are considered objectionable by the community. There are others which may benefit Steemit and its users, including you.

Selling your vote is one of the use cases of your stake in the platform.

Here are some of the reasons to justify vote selling.

The very fact that vote selling services exist without much resistance from the community is enough of a justification to sell your vote, if you wish to.
Another strong reason for selling votes is that earning dividends from your investment is your privilege.
Willingness of users to buy votes from vote selling services shows an increasing demand for content promotion, which you can help fulfill through your vote.|
Sometimes, you may not be active on the platform and your SP may not be earning you anything. It would be more appropriate to enable automatic vote selling so that you can earn SBD/Steem from the service as well as the curation reward for your vote.
You may have bought Steem as a crypto investment for long term hold and may be using Steemit just as a wallet. Instead of keeping this Steem in wallet, you may choose to power up and then sell vote to earn dividends.
It is better than excessive self voting. Instead of voting on your comments and posts, especially if you do it too often, you can sell your vote to whoever is willing to buy it.

There may be many reasons to sell vote. Economic reasons would always prevail though. As a content creator, you want to use vote selling carefully. Just as you need votes from others to earn rewards, others need your vote as well. If you commit all of your voting power to vote selling, it is a bit unfair in my opinion. The decision to sell or not rests with you. I am interested in sharing how to sell your vote and earn some profit.

How to Sell Your Vote?

Currently, @minnowbooster and @smartmarket (content promotion service by @smartsteem) are the two popular content promotion services. MinnowBooster was the first one to enable vote selling and it remains a widely used service. SmartSteem has emerged as a smart alternative. Both offer lucrative vote selling service. Let's look at them separately.

1. Sell Vote Through MinnowBooster

For using all the services offered by MB, you need to become a member of MinnowBooster website by logging in with your Steemit credentials. Here's how to do that.

Go to https://www.minnowbooster.net (MinnowBooster website).
Click My Account on top right and then click Login.
The click will take you to SteemConnect page as shown below. Click CONTINUE to verify your Steemit account.
The click will further take you to the sign in page where you need to enter your username and password. Use only Posting Key because selling votes is possible with posting key.
You will be logged in to the website. Now you are a member.

After becoming a member, you can use all the services offered by MinnowBooster. Selling your vote is a very simple process. It is explained below.

Click My Account and then Edit Info as shown below.
You need to enable vote selling to @minnowbooster by sliding the button to green. Then you should authorize the bot to vote on your behalf. Then you can adjust the minimum Voting Power below which the bot should not vote on your behalf. Finally, do not forget to update your information. Too much to digest? See the screenshot below.
After enabling vote selling, you also need to authorize MinnowBooster to use your account to vote by clicking where asked. Clicking will take you to the authorization page. Click continue and enter your posting key to enable vote selling. Use active key only if you wish to use other services too.
Do not forget to click the UPDATE button to save your settings.

Here is some of the information that will help you use this service efficiently.

By selling your vote, you earn 85 % of all the SBD against which your vote was used.
Since MB is taking 0.01 SBD as minimum bid on posts, you need to be able to give a vote at least worth $0.03 to have a chance. At current Steem price, at least 115 SP is required. Drop in price will increase the minimum SP requirement and vice versa.
A full vote will cost you 2 % VP. VP is the only cost you pay when your account is used for voting. Set minimum SP such that you can upvote posts from the authors you follow and the comments on your posts too. Dedicating all you VP to MinnowBooster is greedy unless you are unable to be active for some weeks or months.
You can view the history of your vote selling and even the posts on which your vote was used. Randomly visit these posts to check them for quality and if you see an abuse, report in the MinnowBooster discord channel. I did that once and @reggaemuffin immediately unvoted the post and banned the user.
You can always see your earned SBD balance on the site and withdraw it to your Steemit wallet.
MinnowBooster launched Spam Detector last week as announced by @furious-one, which is an amazing step to fight spam. It strengthens the reasons to sell votes knowing that efforts to fight spam are fully on.

I recently set my least VP to 92 % so that I can upvote Steemians mostly and sell votes only when I am inactive, sleeping or at the office. Just today, MinnowBooster asked for Steemians' help in helping minnows by selling votes. I am thankful to @techblogger for including the link to my MinnowBooster tutorial. You can read the post by clicking the link.

2. Sell Vote Through SmartSteem

To use SmartSteem to sell your votes, you will have to sign up with their website. Go to SmartSteem.com and click login. Please note that the link contains my referral link. If you sign up using my referral link, you lose nothing and I gain a small percentage of SmartSteem's profits (not yours). I always value transparency so I disclosed the information right away.

An interesting aspect of SmartSteem is manual whitelisting. Whitelisting is done to evaluate content produced by applicants. After the review, users are given any of the three SmartScore ratings.

Excellent: If your content is rated excellent, you get three stars.
Good: If your content is of good quality, you get two stars. This is where I am right now.
Average: If your content is just okay, you get one star.

Selling votes on via SmartSteem service becomes a great activity considering it allows us to vote for only the content that is worth voting. To enable vote selling, click Features under your profile. It will take you to vote selling settings page.

Enable vote selling.
Configure when you wish to be paid out. Whatever you earn in this period will be sent to your wallet.
Set the least VP below which the service won't be able to use your vote. Keep the limit higher than 80 % to always have good VP at your disposal. I need to change the settings.
Choose the content quality on which you wish your vote to be used. I choose good quality. If you choose anyone, you cannot ensure if the content you voted on if of the required quality. I recommend voting only to whitelisted users (at least average quality) to prevent abuse.

Here's what the form looks like.

But to enable SmartSteem to use your vote, you need to authorize it first. You can do it on the above form. Mine is already authorized.

That's it. Your vote will now be sold whenever the conditions you set are satisfied. You will earn 85 % of whatever the amount of SBD your vote was used against.

Here are some reasons you may be interested in selling votes through SmartSteem.

Selling votes on a market, which gives you 85 % of whatever your vote earns, is better than self-voting comments and posts excessively to earn rewards; which is not a good practice.
You can choose the quality of content your votes are used on. This is like upvoting good quality but with the added advantage of earning a fair amount of SBD.
By voting good content through the service, you also earn curation rewards.

I changed minimumVP to 89 % on SmartSteem to ensure that my votes are sold only when I am inactive, sleeping or at the office. My voting priorities are explained here. You need to have enough SP (always based on Steem's current price) to be able to sell your vote. You can increase your SP by earning author and curation rewards. Alternatively, you can buy Steem and power up or use it to lease some SP (see MinnowBooster guide for that).

Conclusion

Automated vote selling is possible through SmartSteem (by @therealwolf) and MinnowBooster (by @cryptomancer, @thecryptodrive, and @reggaemuffin). The option to sell votes presents an investment opportunity for you. These two services are aimed at helping minnows, so you can aid them in their mission and earn some sweet profit.

If you have any question, do share it in the comments. It would be kind of you to support this post through your valuable upvotes and resteems. Helping this post with upvotes will not only benefit the community at large, but also will encourage me to put more effort into educating Steemians to create a better ecosystem on Steemit.