How do we choose the right amount of voting power to give to others versus keep for ourselves? What percentage of votes are Steem authors using to vote on our own posts? Where do we find data to help decide what is a reasonable amount of voting power to use on ourselves and what amount is excessive? When does it seem reasonable to vote our own posts up and when does it become excessive?
For example, is a self upvote once daily reasonable? How about 3? 5? 10?
Self Upvoting by Top Authors?
My first month on Steemit I did a lot of self upvoting for $1 per upvote with about 40 upvotes a day. The next month I gave up voting my own posts to see how much it would really cost after my vote got up to almost $40. Today I am trying a mixed approach with upvoting some posts I make while not upvoting others.
What to do going forward?
Is an ideal balance to use the majority of our voting power to give to others while investing 10% to 30% back in our own posts because of the data we are about to see from the top 100 authors and from testing it both ways?
Who are the top authors on Steemit?
We can see the authors earning the highest payouts in the last 30 days at
https://steemwhales.com/trending/?d=30
We are going to use "Trending 30 days" and collect data on how the top 100 Steemit authors upvote.
How the 100 top Steemit authors upvote?
I used each of the 100 top author usernames to see their individual Steemit Account Outgoing Votes Info that you can find here: http://steemreports.com/outgoing-votes-info/?account=jerrybanfield Thank you to 
Here are the results for votes from 5 August to 18 August 2017:
What can we conclude?
- With 553,955.201 STEEM and spending 66% of voting power on self,
is the single largest self upvoter on Steem in the last 30 days paying out more rewards back to themselves than any other author earns total with one exception which I will cover in a future post. My 26% self-upvotes with 51,000 Steem Power earn me less than 4% of what
- Each of us gives ourselves back a different amount of voting power. The average votes for the top 100 authors is 200 votes and the percentage is 22.49% for self, while the average self votes of the top 10 is 140 votes and the percentage is 44.10% for self.
- 4 out of the top 9 earning authors vote themselves up with 60%+ of voting power while only
and
use 10% or below.
- The difference in amount of Steem Power versus voting power disguises the actual earnings from self upvotes. For example,
In summary, self upvoting is allowing for massive earnings at the top while getting rid of it only makes for an incentive to create systems to hide self upvoting which makes it even harder to detect. While it seems fair to give back some to ourselves, using 50% or more of our voting power to just give rewards to ourselves and our friends not only pays well but puts us in a position to continue doing it more in the future. Making upvoting circles, alliances to do vote for vote, and doing self upvotes along with votes for friends and family means success is extremely challenging outside of those systems.
I hope in looking at this it is helpful for us to decide where to go from here? Now the question is do I vote this post up or not :) ? If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk
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