The two highest money making posts here are those that reach the Hot posts or the Trending posts pages, of course the trending post is the best one, a trending post gets above $500.00 at this moment. Now how do you get to post at least a hot post? The answer is WHALES, you attract whale votes and your post will certainly be a hot one and will probably get to be a trending post. The more whales vote for you the higher the reward you receive, this is obvious.
Now getting those whale votes is very difficult, because I have not seen any apparent pattern for them, whales seem to upvote their friends or acquaintances and every so often they will randomly vote for some post, I know this is true because I have gotten a few whale votes on articles with not much merit, while others I have written which had way better content got no big votes.
So there is no sure way of getting these votes except befriending a whale, or getting lucky. Now I have been looking at these trending post and I have seen something, even though I raised this subject with someone who is much more involved than I and he said this idea is not valid, but anyway here it is. A lot of trending articles use high value upvote bots, I guess everyone knows about these, you bid a certain amount of SBD and these bots upvote your post with a vote value according to what you bid.
Now, I have tested these bots and the return is not that good, you either lose a little, break even or in the luckiest cases you do make a profit. But if you spend a reasonable amount of SBD, say SBD75.00 or thereabouts this should be enough to get you on the hot page, here luck has to play a part also, on this page your post definitely gets a lot of visibility and hopefully a good amount of people will upvote you because of the curation reward. Now depending on the quality of your content this could even send it to trending status.
Have I personally tested this? No. But I have been reading a lot of trending posts and I have found that a lot of the authors of these posts use upvote bots, now knowing you don't make much money or even lose when you use these bots, the only reason these knowledgeable guys have for using them is because they know this will help their post gain visibility.
I am not recommending that you use this method, but you can verify what I am saying by going to the trending page and you will see that many of the posts there have been upvoted by bots from these upvoting services, I believe you will notice that what I am saying is true.
Remember it isn't always the greatest content that gets the best rewards, for this you have to have good connections and also good tactics, such as the upvote bots, you would have to study the timing for these votes as I guess you would have to receive them not much after posting your article.