How often do you upvote? For most users they are under-utilising their upvote. Your vote power regenerates 20% per day (you can check the current vote power at https://steemnow.com by entering your username in the top right) and each full vote uses 2%. This means that you can give a full vote 10 times per day and be back at full power by the following day. If you have more than 500 Steem Power you can adjust the power of your vote to spread your votes across more posts. I have noticed that many accounts (my own included) aren't making full use of their votes. There is lots of great content on Steemit and you (and I) should be rewarding it. (Nb: there are a small number of overly generous people who have burned their vote power really low - if your vote power is below 20% you are probably over-doing it and this message isn't for you - but kudos for being so generous 👍)
Source: fotosearch.com (bwbw1049)
Who to vote for
Posts that you like! No matter what your interests are there is a ton of amazing content. Whilst you will get a curation reward if you vote in the first 30 minutes of a post occurring you shouldn't let this dictate your voting behaviour. The curation rewards are pretty small so if you like an older post (although less than 7 days old) you should still vote for it. If there is a user who you really like and want to always vote for (and guarantee curation rewards) you can set up an auto-vote on https://steemvoter.com/. This site lets you set a number of automatic votes for particular users whenever they post.
Self-voting
Although there is not unanimous agreement, general consensus seems to be that voting for yourself is okay - provided you aren't only voting for yourself. If you are spending all 20 votes on your own posts and comments then you are missing the point of the reward economy. Eventually people will catch on and you will find fewer other people voting for you. You (and others) can use http://www.steemreports.com/outgoing-votes-info/
to see who you are voting for. I have found this is a useful tool for seeing where your votes are going (and it stimulated this post since I felt that I wasn't voting widely enough).
