I've been managing a few communities recently and a common topic that minnows have on their minds is how to make the most out of Steem. I've made great efforts to lead them the right way, but I think that it's time to make a post about it so that I can share it with them whenever they ask generic questions.
1. Busy
The first one is the easiest one. All you have to do is use busy.org instead of Steemit, and in your post's tags, include the tag busy. There you go, if the sum of your followers' SP is more than a certain minimum amount, which I believe is 500 SP but I could be wrong, then the Busy bot will upvote your post in a few days.
Busy has 2 tiers.
- The lower tier get
busy.orgupvotes. I think that it's between 500 SP and 1,000,000 SP in the sum of your followers' SP.
- The second tier is
busy.payupvotes.
As you can see, busy.org upvotes are $0.2 and busy.pay upvotes are $1.15.
To get followers with higher SP
You have a few alternatives.
- Comment a lot (what I do)
- Follow
and he'll follow you back. You'll have enough for
busy.orgat least since he has a few thousand SP.
Note that you can only get one busy upvote every 12 hours and that you may get upvoted many days later because there are a lot of people to upvote.
2. Faucets
You won't get much here, maybe like 0.016 SBD/day, but all you have to do is leave an upvote and a comment every day on 
It's not much work and it's extra income by doing nothing.
For every upvote/resteem/comment that you leave on Sydesjokes' posts, you will get an "interaction" point. When a certain amount of interactions have been reached, Sydesjokes will send SBD directly to your wallet as a reward, so you can stalk him a bit as well if you want some extra cents.
3. Leaving comments
Many authors reward the users who comment on their posts with upvotes. I do this, I leave a 0.02 upvote (and next week, 0.06 upvote) on every relevant comment that I see in my comment section. There are other authors who can leave you up to $5 if you leave them really great comments.
A way to earn some upvotes is to add those authors to your 
4. Bots for minnows
There are some bots dedicated to making minnows' lives easier. I didn't know about them when I was starting, and now that I know about them, I can at least recommend them to those who are looking for a bit of extra income.
- The
bot will upvote you with around 0.09, and Pharesim often votes an extra 0.2. You can get this vote every 48 hours currently. It was 24 hours before, then 36, now 48. All you have to do is go to their Discord channel, read their rules, register and then you just leave the bot a message telling it to upvote you!
- If you delegate
500 SP for registration (maybe you also have to go into their Discord server and see how things work; I haven't tried this one myself), it upvotes every post you make with around $1.2. That's a lot for a simple delegation of only 500 SP. However, not many starters have that. I myself don't have that amount, so I can't try yet.
I'm sure there are other bots, so if you know any, please share them in the comment section!
5. Consistency
This is the most important thing, and many newbies disregard this. Don't post every 4 days and then complain that everything is too slow. Your earnings will improve exponentially if you post everyday and if you constantly interact with the community.
If you make friends, they will constantly upvote your posts.
I have showed you some tools, but if you aren't consistent, you won't benefit from them at all. These tools give you tiny amounts, but you have to make sure to be attentive and use them as much as you can. Many of these may not be of use later, when many people are aware of them. So try them out! Get some money!