Our team has been researching the ROI of various promotion methods on Steem, and we’ve found that paying for upvotes delivers some wacky, very high ROI.
We’ve tested both large budgets and small budgets - and while we’re focusing more on smaller budgets in this post we can already say that these paid upvotes are representing one of the best opportunities in paid promotion right now!
For now, we’re going to discuss paid upvotes with small budgets.
A Pleasant Surprise
Because of the nature of Steem, we assumed that paid upvotes would only deliver a positive ROI when you used a large budget to boost your post to the top of the trending page. However, we were wrong! Smaller budgets can work with paid upvotes, and you shouldn’t be afraid of utilizing this promotion method with a smaller budget.
Our budget’s varied, but we mostly stuck around the 5 SBD mark, and in return averaged around 4 SBD and 2 Steem Power.
A Unique and Promising Alternative to PPC Ads
The interesting part of paying for promotion with upvotes is that even without considering the increased exposure, you’ve got a positive ROI! This is in direct contrast to ads on Facebook where the money you’re spending on Ads can only be recuperated if customers are gained from the ads.
When you factor in the exposure and increase in engagement we received, it really becomes a no brainer to pay for upvotes. Posts in which we paid for upvotes received 2-3x the engagement of a non promoted post. Just 5 SBD would net around 30 upvotes and 20 comments. We weren’t tracking resteem/reblogs, but we can assume there were a few of those as well.
This results in an alternative to traditional advertising that’s effective, and low competition!
Now’s the Time to Experiment with Paid Promotion on Steem
Here’s the thing, just like any advertising medium, it will get costlier over time. Our 5 SBD will cease getting the same results as more brands and individuals begin to pay for their own upvotes. It’ll mimic Facebook, where the early days represented incredible ROI for ad campaigns, but over time costs increased.
So, this is really the best time to get started with paid promotion on Steem. There’s not much competition, and if you put in just a portion of your monthly ad spend, you’ll find that much of it can be used for next months paid promotion too!
We’ve already started testing larger budgets after completing successful tests on lower budgets, and we recommend you test out your own promoted posts on the platform as well! This kind of ROI won’t be around forever!
Remember, these are just preliminary thoughts on the subject, and we’ll have more data coming as we complete more tests. Soon, we hope to have a complete guide to paying for promotion on steem, so be sure to follow to be one of the first to see that guide when it’s out.