Its been one week of using upvote bots and resteem bots to ‘promote’ my blog. It has been an interesting week but I am now ready and eager for my bot free week as part of the great bot experiment

Some statistics from week one

During the last week I published 6 posts that I upvoted with bidbots (between 1 and 5SBD per post), for a total of 13.5SBD - that is a lot for a minnow like me! It will be interesting over the next week as the payouts come in to see how profitable using these bots has been! Looking at my statistics it seems the bots themselves have performed quite poorly - all but one of them ended with a negative ROI (according to Steembottracker). The worst performing was a ROI of negative 13.29%, and the best was a positive ROI of 12.83%. The average ROI was -2.6%

A big part of the struggle to gain a positive ROI currently will be because of the recent surge in price of STEEM (this surge means people become more active, and more people are creating accounts). This can be confirmed by checking out the daily stats created by Hive account@penguinpablo - over the past week there has been an uptrend in votes being made and comments as well. More people using Steemit = more competition for the bidbots = lower ROI.

How does using bots affect the effort you put in?

I know alot of people say that they are likely to put more effort in if they can use bots to upvote their posts to atleast get a few dollars payout, but I found the opposite the longer the week went on - I could spend less time and effort and I would still get the upvote no matter what. I think this week will be interesting and I will spend more time and effort on my posts, because they are my shot to gain people's attention, rather than buying some votes to get to the hot page!

What this week has also made me aware of and pay more attention to is peoples payouts, and whether they were organic or paid for. I follow a few people who write excellent content and don't seem to use bots, and this shows that you can do well on Steemit without the use of bots!

Resteem bots

Before the experiment I thought resteem bots were a great way to boost your following and get more eyes on your content. I have noticed a few more people coming to check out my posts because of these resteem bots but I have been checking out their profiles and in general they aren't the type of people who will end up engaging with your content long term - alot of them are mass followers, often following 10k+ accounts! So they may see your 1 post and even upvote it the chances of them being active followers is slim.

After reading an article last week about the poor quality of followers of the resteem bots I did some digging and looked randomly at some of their followers - the majority of the ones I looked at were inactive or bots!

Summary

Using upvote bots has in general been a negative ROI experience (according to steembottracker) and has had an effect on how much effort I am putting into my posts. I think that using resteem bots is pretty much a waste of time, effort and money - you would be better to spend more time engaging with and commenting on content you enjoy!

So, on to week two of my experiment - no paid bid bots and no resteem bots, starting with this post. It will certainly be an interesting week!