Promoting Your Content
As a minnow or dolphin, it is always a struggle to get your content noticed, regardless of its quality. You can put a lot of time and effort into writing something great, only to have it get < 10 views and a few cents worth of upvotes. The exact same content may well earn a substantial amount of rewards if it gets seen by enough steemians, but unless you get lucky and a whale spots it early, it may well go no where.
There are a few reasons for this, one is that any whale / dolphin can give there post a lot more visibility than yours simply by upvoting it themselves. A self-upvote of $5.00 or more will give a post far more visibility than 20 minnow upvotes that you might get organically from publishing something really good. Furthermore, a self-upvote is quite efficient. If the whale times it well they can capture over 85% of the total upvote value for themselves by self-upvoting so they have no real incentive not to self-upvote their own posts aggressively.
Thus for your high quality content to reach a significant number of people the first step is to give it a big enough upvote that it gets listed above self-upvoted shitposts from whales/dolphins. Luckily for us, bid-based vote bots give us a reasonably efficient way to do this and level the playing field!
The key concept to remember, is that we are not buying the upvote for the immediate value of that upvote itself. We are buying the upvote for additional value of all the upvotes we will get from people who otherwise would never have even seen our content!
How Bid Bots work
The way bid-based upvote bots work is very simple. Any user can place a bid buy sending SBD to the bot and a post link in the memo. Most bots have a minimum bid. Some also accept STEEM.
Every X minutes (usually every 2.4 hours), they casts votes on every post that it got a bid for. It weights these votes based on the amount each person bid, divided by the sum of all of the bids. So for example, say in the 2.4 hour period the bot received 100SBD in total bids from all users and you bid 2SBD. You would then get a 2% upvote from the bot.
For example, I sent 3.24 SBD to booster for this post
The total bid pool that round was about 44.2SB so I get a 3.24/44.2 = 7.33% upvote.
Obviously these bots are aimed to make a profit for their owner, so on average they must out-perform self upvoting or the bot owner would just have it upvote his own accounts. This means that in general, if we are buying votes we need to be doing so with high quality content which, once it gets the bots upvote and is shown to lots of people, will attract many additional votes.
Luckily for me, in this case it worked out. The post got noticed by other voters, got resteemed and end up making about 16 in author rewards
Not bad for a 3.24SBD investment.
However, if you've tried bid-bots in the past, you probably know, that you usually don't do nearly this well. So how do we use bid-bots optimally?
Optimizing bid-bot usage
Our goal is to bid on the bots that have the biggest ratio of upvote strength to bid-pool at any given time. We need to be aware that everyone else using these bots has the same goal. At the same time to optimize our performance, we want to time the bot upvote so that it happens reasonably early so that our post does well in the "trending" rankings AND so that more than 75% of the bots vote goes to us (the author) rather than to the curation pool. Remember that upvotes received in less than 30 minutes give a higher than 75% percentage to the author.
Luckily for us, there is a site that makes all of this possible: http://www.steembottracker.com/
This site lists all of the bid-based bots and shows when they will cast their next vote, the value of their 100% vote, and how much more users can bid before their ROI becomes negative. When bidding we need to remember that other users will bid too and that every user who bids after us decreases our ROI.
One strategy is to wait to publish your post, until about 10-20 minutes before one of the larger bots with a high remaining profitable pool bids. The purchase an upvote from that bot, and then before the bot upvotes our post, we want to self upvote it so that we take some of the curation reward away from the bot and give it to ourselves.
The other strategy is to aim to have the bot vote about 40 minutes after your post goes live (and gain to self-upvote before then). This distributes the curation rewards more to the minnows who upvote your post early which can be nice.
Note that you can click on any bots "details" button and click the last round tab and view who bid, how much the bid and the total ROI.
More often than not the ROI is slightly negative although with careful timing you should be able to at least break even. That is okay! Remember our goal is not to profit directly off the bot, but rather to use the bot as efficiently as profitable and to get rewards from all the people who notice our great content because it shows up on trending thanks to the bots early upvote.
Other bot types
If you don't like the bid-based bots you can use bots like randowhale (which I love but is usually sleeping) that deliver a randomized immediate upvote based on the amount you send it. I strongly advise against bots like steemlike that guarantee a fixed percentage return on the about you send. The reason for this is that these bot types are very erratic in terms of WHEN you receive your upvote.
For us it is essential that our upvotes come within an hour of our post so that it can show up high on the trending list and get a lot of organic vote value.
Steemit's Promoted
In theory the promoted section seems like it is a good way to let people promote their content without going through 3rd party bots.
In practice, my results with it have always been terrible. If anyone has success stories from using the built in promote feature, I'd love to hear them.
Final Comments
If you are a minnow trying to build a following on steemit, voting bots are a key tool that allows you to compete with many of the whales/dolphins who are lazy and write weak content and self-upvote it. You can get your content as high on the trending list as their content and then soar past them once you get a bunch of organic votes from the community. Without an early boost, their content will bury yours and you often will get no traction at all.
Using bid bots efficiently lets you get the most bang for your buck and I definitely recommend that any minnows look to reinvest a significant percentage of the SBD they earn through post rewards into buying upvotes for their future content.