Interesting strategy and discovery, and it works in a sense cuz it brought me here haha but I'd like to just add that the material of the article along with the coverage is key in my experience. If we use some of my first post for example:

Neither was promoted or trending, But you can see the vast difference from these articles. One with 437 upvotes, favored by the people but not so much the "Big Boys" whereas the other article has 18 upvotes but more than double the amount of LEO than the first. But lets take a look at an article of mine that was promoted:

I lucked out and my timing was perfect, I had gotten promoted by Hive account@leofinance themselves for using their new onboarding system and my testimony of switching over from Publish0x. The rewards are substantially greater for being promoted, but granted again promoted by THEE leo himself and it was my first introduction article. It almost isn't fair to compare to the previous, but this helped me to understand after a few articles later how material and coverage play their part. But this is also proof for myself that trending articles do receive more love in a sense.

Being new to the platform, I realized quickly how important it is to stake Leo, allowing you to have a stronger voice. A stronger voice lets you post articles and curate messages more often and these give you opportunities to earn more Leo. Maybe that's why I'm not so in favor of promoting myself, my Leo is limited being new to the platform.

With this in mind I am trying to apply some pointers made by Hive account@khazrakh in his article "The Power Of Networking In A Decentralized World" In this way networking efficiently can score you a free promotion by some of our ROARING stakeholders.

Just my 2 Satoshi's on the subject lol anyhow nice material and coverage ;) like I mentioned it works, and I hope you yield profits this year. Thanks for the read \m/