The power of your vote

Do you know what happens when you give someone an upvote? Most people don’t, so I figured a tutorial post about upvoting could be useful and how YOU can make the most out of your vote.

What happens when you give someone an upvote?

As you know, from the moment your post goes live, you can collect upvotes. A week later you get payed out. You get 75% of the value and 25% goes to ‘curation’.

What is Curation?

Curation is 25% of the reward pool on that post. Your share of curation depends on the size of your upvote from the total reward pool.

So you can earn something back by giving someone an upvote.

Beware, curation although displayed in $ is actually paid out in STEEM POWER and the $ is not USD but SBD.

_{Upvotes are indicated with the green 'arrows-up' and the amount next to the arrow indicated the total reward pool of that post.}

What do I get back?

The amount you get back is based on 4 factors:

1. How much did you upvote of the total reward pool of the post?
2. When did you make the upvote?
3. When have the ‘big’ votes come in?
4. How many people have voted on the post?

Let us make this example to explain this:

My vote was worth 1 SBD and the total value of the reward pool is 10. That means I voted for 10% of the total value and thus also receive 10% of curation rewards.

_{If the pie represents the total reward pool of the post, then the author receives 75% of it and 25% goes to curation after 7 days}

_{Based on our example above you would receive 10% of that 25% for curation}

This would be true, if it wasn’t for the time factor. If you upvote someone 1 minute after they have written the post, you get 1% of that 0,25 (0,0025) and the author gets the other 99% (7,7475). This cascades over the first 30 minutes of the post going live. So if you vote in the 29th Minute after the post going live, you get 99% (0,2475) of that 0,25 and the author gets 1% (7,5025)

What also has an impact is when the big votes come in, this will impact the amount you get depending if you voted before or after those votes were made. However I don’t know how that’s calculated. Maybe someone who’s reading this post can help me with that explanantion and I’ll post edit it into this post.

Finally, simple maths, but the more people who vote the smaller your share will be, especially if their votes are worth a lot.

For new people it's important to know that you do not receive the value of the post as you see it at the end of the 7 days, taking all those factors into consideration. Many people have indicated that they want to receive their rewards at the end of the 7 days as 50%/50%, this means that you will receive 50% of the 75% in SBD and 50% of that 75% in STEEM POWER. For the actual conversion rates, please refer to the steemit market.

_{Here you indicate how you want your payouts to be done}

Also, don't forget to regularly claim your rewards, by going to your wallet and click on 'Redeem Rewards', if they remain sitting there you're not improving your STEEM POWER or earning any SBD's:

Conclusion

I hope you understand now that random voting is not beneficial and is also very time-consuming if you just vote on random stuff. Vote on people and articles you like, the system is setup so that good authors get rewarded and poor authors also get what they deserve.

Look out for groups of likeminded people as they will be more prone to vote for your articles and if you want each other to benefit, also use tools such as Hive account@qurator, steemvoter and streemian. I will explain more about these services in another post.

Make your vote count

There are a lot of people on Steemit who use bots to buy votes and thus appear higher in the trending rankings. If you are careful with your voting power and you would like to earn a bit of extra income by selling your upvotes to non-spammers, I recommend you to use Smartsteem. I let them use my vote whenever my Voting Power is higher than 89% and a few times a week I get paid out in SBD!!! Over the month of February I earned 8,748 SBD this way.

_{Those are all votes I've made today through Smartsteem and I will receive payout over the next day or so}

Feel free to use this referral link to register: https://smartsteem.com?r=wolfje

How does Smartsteem work?

Smartsteem is a clever service developed by Hive account@therealwolf (great guy with a boring name 😉) to offer services to serious people here on the Steemit-network. You can purchase upvotes, delegate steempower and much more. My friend Hive account@felander has made a great post about the benefits of Smartsteem over other methods of delegation and vote buying/selling. Each member gets personally approved by Hive account@therealwolf so it's all serious steemers who benefit from this system.

I hope this post was helpful for you and feel free to comment or even add. I will edit this post where needed.

On a final note, be on the lookout, it’s March so a new competition is on its’ way.

Thanks,

Doron