This article will be very helpful for minnows and plankton's on Steemit ,who are desiring to earn passive income from upvotes.
First of all let me tell you about my journey on steemit.I was successful in creating a new account known as 
My first post on steemit didn't received any of the upvotes and within an hour I realized that something was wrong because my content was perfect and was showing in the index of new posts page,by reading posts by whales I was mesmerized by watching their upvotes on post and account value , below the wallet tab there was a profuse value of the account but STEEM and SBD were missing ,it was neither transferred to blocktrades and nor to any other steemit account ,all money was given to bots like @Upme and 
Bots are precious to get ahead of everyone in less amount of time.I estimated if people Invest $300 in one post they should have an ROI of $320 from bot divided in STEEM ,SBD and STEEM POWER out of which 25% of earning goes to curation rewards.Moreover,you need to write good quality content in order to get good ROI else you may not recover your investment,so it is not a trading platform where investing is only enough to earn profit,you need to put lot of efforts in order to get good return in less amount of time.
People who started with some money were 50% more successful than people who started from zero.Steemit has now crossed 1 million users and if you don't make any investment on your knowledge it will be all waste because to approach users you just have few seconds and people vote only those who has already consumed many votes.
image src - https://slack-files2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/avatars/2016-04-17/35403699815_7c314aa82e15f313722b_512.png