One month ago, on July 26th, I decided to stop upvoting myself and only give my upvotes to other authors. I predicted in this post that I could earn much more by doing so.
My current 100% upvote is worth 2 cents. If I were to upvote myself 10 times a day (not to go below 80% voting power) I would earn 20 cents per day. That would translate to 6 SBD per month.
That's only theoretically, because this scenario would never happen in practice. I create around 1-2-3 posts per day. I would have to force myself to find enough posts to comment on to fill the remaining 'quota' for self-upvotes until I reach 10. I am not willing to comment just for the sake of commenting to upvote myself. Also, I find it strange to upvote my own comments.
So, in practice, by upvoting my own posts, I would normally earn around 2 SBD per month.
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Since July 28th I've been using https://steemvoter.com/ to automate my voting habits and thus to increase my curation rewards. I've created a list of my favorite authors from those that I decided to follow and added them to my Steem Voter. I've continually updated this lists in the past 30 days.
By doing this I increased my curation rewards by almost 400%.
That might sound like a big number, but translated to actual $ it's not much. At the time of writing this post I've earned 4.666 kV in the past 30 days from curation. I might be wrong on this and please let me know if I am, a little over 2.000 kV translates to 1 STEEM. So, I earned a little over 2 STEEM from curation. That's about 3 SBD.
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Some data bellow, thanks to steemdb.com
These were my curation rewards on July 26th, the day I stopped self-upvoting.
These were my curation rewards on August 2nd, a week since I started using Steem Voter.
My curation rewards on August 10th.
My curation rewards today, August 27th.
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Since using Steem Voter I increased my upvotes number from around 5-10 per day to 40-60 per day.
A chart indicating my number of upvotes on August 7th. The little red circle indicated the day I started using Steem Voter.
A chart indicating my number of upvotes today on August 27th.
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I earned 3 SBD from curation in the past 30 days, but practically I didn't make a profit because I paid 3 SBD for the premium service for Steem Voter that allows me to have 500 rules. Otherwise I would be allowed only 10 rules because of my current Steem Power. :-)
I'll continue using Steem Voter and pay for it's premium service for at least 1 or 2 months.
I think that by continually readjusting my rules, the voting power, the time of upvoting and the list of authors, I might be able to start making a profit. Of course, the first target would be to make at least a profit of 2 SBD per month, what I would normally earn if I were to self-upvote my posts. The second target would be to make at least a profit of 6 SBD per month, what I could earn if I were to give 10 100% upvotes to myself.
I could probably earn more from curation if I were to be more pragmatic and upvote posts from more well known authors that have posts that often become huge.
And of course, I would talk about different numbers if I were to have more Steem Power. :-)
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Although Steem Voter automates my voting, it's kinda a semi-automated process. I read many of the posts that are upvoted. There were a couple of times I removed my upvote because I didn't like the posts for various reasons. Also, I've chosen to add to my Steem Voter only authors that I currently follow and which content I enjoy the most.
Unfortunately, at the current moment, my upvote doesn't count for much. It contributes more to the reputation score than their wallet. :-)