Lets talk about Bid-bots ....
Do you use them ? Good vs. Bad and everything inbetween.
How to use Bid-bots ..
Correctly using bid-bots can be an expensive lesson to learn. You could spend a ton of your hard earned SBD or Steem and end up with massive negative ROI ( return on investment ).
To use a bid-bot you first need to find one and you can do this by visiting https://steembottracker.com/. Once there you will find a list of Bid-bots in which you can choose from. To send a bid simply send the desired amount of SBD / Steem through your Steemit wallet to the bid bot and paste the url of your article in the memo section.
I found a bot -- Now What ?
So you went to https://steembottracker.com/ and found a bot.
First make sure you check the min and max bid values the bot accepts. Some bots will return invalid bids and some will not. For example you don't want to bid 0.10 SBD if the min bid is 1 SBD. This is a good way to loose your SBD and get no bid in return.
The second thing you want to be looking at is the min / max age of posts the bot will vote on. Allot of bots won't vote on post that are not at least 20 minutes old. Some will not bid on post that are older then 3.5 days. The min / max varies per bot. If you send a bid into a bot for a post you created 4 days ago without checking the max age of a post the bot will bid on, you might not receive a bid and may not get your SBD used to make the bid back.
The third thing you want to look for before placing your bid is the total value of the bots bid. If a bot has a total bid value of $1 and you are looking to promote your post with a $5 upvote then the bot with a total value upvote of $1 isn't going to get that done for you. You will either have to use multiple bots or find a bot with a higher value vote. All these values can clearly be seen on steembottracker.
A good way to see if your bid will be profitable or not is to look at the graph section on steembottracker that says Max Suggested Bid. DO NOT bid more then the suggested unless you want to get a poor return on your investment. Allot of bots will return your funds if the bid round is full to protect you against receiving massive negative ROI but others do not and will accept any bid sent to it.
Good Vs. Bad Bots ...
Everyone's opinions varies on bots. Some will not upvote a post if they see an upvote bot was used on it. Others only dislike the ones that don't have min / max post aged attached to them. I am here to tell you there is no such thing as a good bot or bad bot. Each bot owner is doing the same thing.... selling a service and profiting from it.
Some dislike bots that don't have a min / max post age requirement due to the fact that curation rewards are diminished for upvoters for the first 20 - 30* minutes of a post creation. And for the reason that authors can profit from a last minute upvote from a bot with no Max age requirement just before the 7 day post payout has been reached. These are all personal choices and don't make a bot good or bad. HOWEVER ... you should keep in mind that Steemit is self policed so using such tactics may get your post flagged and diminish your rewards.
If you are going to use bots, I have one last tip. Don't send in bids until minutes before the round ends as last minute bids can be the difference between a break-even / positive ROI and negative ROI.