I had a friend who has been on steem for awhile now and still did not understand how people are getting to the top of the trending page or more importantly, how they were earning more steem tokens than he was.
So let us begin. Bots are steem accounts that are set up to sell there vote to others. You send them SBD (some of them take steem also) with a link to your post in the memo. Then the bot will vote on your content a percentage of its vote value according to how much you sent it. https://steembottracker.com/ is the web site I use that makes this interaction easy and it lists a lot of the bots that are out there.
Pay attention to the numbers. How much vote value the bot has, how much of the next vote has already been purchased and so on. It is possible to lose money using the bots also. Generally the larger the vote that you are trying to buy = higher chance to lose money on your bid after curation.
Don't forget others get 25% of what you get from the bots most of the time.
Best Regards,
Dreamryder007