I am going to give you my insights on the ways to make money on Steemit before Hardfork 19, which might change some of these.
The first tip is make friends with a few whales or better yet write articles that are so good whales are waiting for them to upvote them, this will give you a large amount of money and put your article in the hot tab on it’s way to trending.
Manage to get a loyal following of between 50 to 100 people who will upvote your articles on a regular basis, depending on their voting power this could assure you between 5-10 dollars per post and the possibility of getting into the hot tab.
Join a guild or a voting circle (I was assured these don’t exist, but I know they do) you vote for everyone’s posts and they will do the same for you, your reward will depend on the voting power of the members. So you might think there isn’t much integrity with this, but what is the difference with the loyal followers? They, too will upvote anything you post regardless of quality. I just posted an article and it has made 2 cents and yet 1 comment on this article has made 55 cents, so the circles or guilds work, imagine if this guy makes 50 comments a day he will make nearly $30.00 just on these.
Be in the voting Bot list, depending on their voting power they could make your rewards sky rocket. I was being upvoted by a few bots and usually had 6 votes seconds after having posted, I don’t know if I posted something the bot master didn’t like, but now I don’t get these votes, perhaps the bots were deleted.
Use tags that are trending, some good ones are anarchism, libertarian, steem, steemit, crypto, life. Trump used to be a good one, not any more, sad.
Having a recognized name is great, like for example 
Now we come to curating, and I believe this is the problem faced by most minnows and the new red fishes, you see I have noticed if I upvote a post that just makes cents or maybe a dollar my reward is 0.001 but if I upvote a trending post I get at least 0.004, I only have one million vests so I can give close to 2 cents per vote, now someone with 50 million vests whose vote is worth at least 1 dollar if he votes for a minnow’s 50 cent post will receive as curation reward maybe 0.05 but if he upvotes a trending post he gets 0.2, that’s a 15 cents difference, suppose he votes 50 times a day that would mean over 200 dollars more every month for not voting for the minnow, and giving his vote to the trender.
So you see this is like real life, the 1 per cent on top get most of the money, and it’s very difficult to get there, but remember it is free money so you can’t really complain.But you could also invest a lot of money become a whale and reap the rewards, this is the easy but expensive and risky way.
Right now I am waiting for hardfork 19, I want to see if it brings us minnows any benefits, frankly I don’t think it will change much for us, but you can always hope.