If you want to have a revenue stream from your SP holdings but you do not want to lease your SP out then curation trails are for you. Special services, like steemauto.com, provide you an opportunity to sign up for someones curation trail and your account will automatically follow the upvotes that the trail leader makes. At the same time your steempower remains your and available for you to use - you can upvote posts as usual while earning some side money. If trail leader is successful in earning curation rewards you account will also take on part of the action. That is you should not expect to get the same results but you might be quite close.
What trail should I sign up for?
One of the common answers says that you should look at the popular trails as people discovered them as the most profitable ones. This is only partially true, since your position in the trail matters. The closer you are to the trail leader the higher your rewards will be. Hence, it is good to see these trails with hundreds people but you will not get much by signing up for these.
The better answer is to go for yet undiscovered trails. This way you will be much closer to the trail leader and you will likely get more rewards. The only problem is to find these reward making trails. There are thousands of trails available and I doubt you have time to go thru these and evaluate. But there is a solution: sign up for my trail on steemauto here. If link does not work - then go and search my account there by yourself. Please note that you will need to link you account with steemauto in order to use its services.
Why is your trail better that others?
Three reasons:
- The trail is small, and that is probably the most important reason in cooperation with,
- relatively high curation rewards per SP that I use (check my curation rewards and divide by the SP I have), and
- I do not use that much SP, so more rewards are going to be generated by your trail votes for you.
By the way, you find someone with higher curation rewards per SP used - let me know in the comments. I will certaily award you with my 100% upvote (which is not much :) ).
What are the risks?
There are almost no risks for you. Steemauto will only require you to provide posting permission thru steemconnect so your keys are safe. You do not have to pay for the service and you can opt out at any moment you like.
Any caveats?
Due to the nature of curation rewards small accounts may find it troubling to get any rewards at all. My suggestions are the following:
Assume that you follow my trail and my trail only, then you should expect to get reasonable rewards if your SP is above 100 SP and you do not restrict the voting power when folloing my trail. If, for instance, you have 1000 SP then you may restrict the voting power to 10% and you still should expect to get reasonable curation rewards. But if you account has only 30 SP you may not see that many curation rewards as for some posts these may be below the payout threshold and steemit just does not pay these.
Your voting power may go down significantly. To prevent that you can use the limiter provided by steemauto and you will maintain any level you want at the expense of smaller curation rewards (as your account will miss out on some upvoting opportunities).