Follow your site on Steemd.com . The number in the upper right hand corner is VESTS. Your value is at 211.55 . VESTS is somehow related to Steem Power.

The only good advice I've come by so far is that one should vote ten times a day but not much more than than that.

Voting on your own posts is considered okay. But only vote on your own post if someone else has voted on it. Otherwise the vote gets wiped out as a rounding error.

The part about leaving comments on the posts of dolphins and whales is sound. A dolphin VESTS start at ten million 10,000,000 . A whale starts at a billion VESTS.

Steem Power is derived from the number of VESTS. I don't know the formula. Your Wallet says that you have 0.104 Steem Power and that the system has delegated 14.907 Steem Power to your account. This gives you 15 Steem Power. The voting power delegated to your account will decrease as you earn Steem. So you will be stuck at 15 for quite awhile.

The problem we face is that a 90% vote at 15 Steem Power is only worth 0.001 . This amount disappears as a rounding error.

Yesterday I found a Vote Power calculator This calculator said that one needs to have 50 Steem Power for the upvote to be worth 0.01. I am aiming for 100 SteemPower . This would make my vote worth 0.02. 100 Steem current costs $250.00 USD.

To be frank. I actually think us new accounts are simply stuck in a hole. We can't dig ourselves out. We are simply at the mercy of big accounts. The only way out of the hole is to either buy $250 worth of Steem Power or to get in good with people with big accounts.