My Paid Upvoting Experience

After a couple of months of slogging away with articles, putting in the hours on shoots and stacking on a heap more hours writing blog posts to accompany my images and bring the ideas and articles in my head to life. In fact in January I wrote an average of just over one large article every other day – when I say ‘large’ I mean over 2000 words, sometimes closer to 4000! By anyone’s standards 32,000+ words in a month on top of endless commenting and taking photos constitutes quite an investment in time.

At the time I rejected the idea, considering the article to be more of a justification of that users willingness to ‘cheat’ to get ahead, than a piece of useful content. But the figures and the words lingered with me, and as I continued to post what I considered to be underappreciated posts the idea reverberated around me. Amplified by time and my sense of injustice I found myself waking up to check how an article had done and deciding enough was enough, it was time to ‘play the game’.

Like a responsible gambler.

I also decide I would measure my success of failure with paid voting, and use my wife as a basis for comparison. She started Steemit a few weeks after me, but puts in the same amount of time and effort as I do, so it felt like a fairly good point of reference. I also fully acknowledge that my rules aren’t by any means universally correct. They just felt right for me!

Something that didn’t really sit right with me from the word go.

I satisfied the nervous voice in my head until the votes started coming in, then felt my nervousness turn to excitement as the numbers racked up. I posted two articles that week, we’ll call them post 1 and post 2, original right! Wait, that feels a little too easy, we’ll call them Nigel and Phil instead.

At the end of the week my worries were somewhat abated when I realised my gamble had indeed proved profitable, if not as profitable as I’d have liked. The upvotes I’d paid for on Nigel pocketed me a not too shabby 41.2 SBD Payout, and a profit of 5.2 SBD or +14.4%. Turns out I was right about the sly dog that was Phil, my 43.5 SBD of votes earned me 51.3 SBD and a return of 7.8 SBD (+17.9%). For these figures I only counted the upvotes I’d paid for, not the ones the posts had on their own from the followers I had already gained.

When it came to the payout Shirley staggered home with just 79.13 SBD, a loss of just over 18 SBD and 19%. Of course SBD its-self had plummeted too, but the problem is there was no HODLing when all of my SBD had been spent. ![1.jpg](

Perseverance.

I started waking up to check my feed, comment on as the users I was following and interact to the max. I was going to make myself as valuable as possible in as many ways as possible, not just my articles and pictures.

There’s also the Steem Power issue. This one there’s not too much to argue with, even if you break even in terms of SBD, you gain in Steem Power. I will put a couple of counter points to you though, first of all we’re ignoring the value of liquid currency. If I had kept the SBD in my wallet, and spent traded when SBD was over $8 in that first week, and buying my own SP, I would have earned a hell of a lot more SP than I gained by paying for votes. Ok, this involved trading which may or may not be in your skillset, but even for a crypto newbie like me, there were trades to be made that nobody would have missed.

So that’s what I’ll do here. I’ll stick at it, keep putting in the hours, creating content and pushing myself. Trying everything to make my mark on Steemit. I have no idea if it’s the fastest way, or the best way, but I know it will feel damn good to look back at this post and feel good about how I have made it happen. Be that in a year, two years, or a decade!