Diversifying your workload by letting others curate on your behalf.
Leasing out voting power for profit.
I would have also added at this stage of your post: supporting some steem project one carries in one's heart. I know this become apparent later, but I think this is important.
Receiving votes on Steem isn't always about the posts or the quality as you might have noticed. It also has a lot to do with that users contributions to the platform on and off it. At the end of the day I don't have trouble falling asleep at night thinking I may have overrewarded myself or abused the voting support I have received through autovotes which may or may not be cast by users who may not be as active to check where their votes are landing on.
I am personally trying to monitor how I vote on a period running over the last 14 days. Of course I fail in checking it only once in a while. My personal goal is to avoid voting too much for a given user, and sharing as much as possible within many different authors. (I btw just checked at the moment and adjusted my future votes accordingly ;) )
I really hope that steemians who are getting (biggish but also smaller) delegations would do something similar (or at least implement a kind of self-control mechanism), trying to self-monitor themselves to make the best usage for the platform of what they got. However, easy said... I have been through more disappointments than anything else so far.
Hehe, disappointments is the right word, so disappointed in many users over the last few months.
But yeah, diversity is a good thing, I'm quite happy currently with the daily ocd noms, my feed, steemgc posts, dlive streamers, decentmemes and then the "plz check this post" in dms. If many other curators were voting on a thousand unique authors a month we'd have so much higher retention rates and bouncebacks from new accounts.
The "plz check this post" is really annoying when it turns to be 25-30 messages a week of people thinking they are entitled to a vote (because they use the steemstem tag in my case), or telling me how bad I am to have missed their posts (having me spending more than 40 hours per week in reading and voting posts is probably not enough, the proof being that I am still managing to write one post per week...). Yeah sometimes, I just want to send everything to hell (actually, it happened 2 weeks ago but now is better).
Already a few hundreds would make a difference. I prefer the baby-step by baby-step way. But I agree :)
Yeah, there are some that don't even try anymore. Like I'm open to checking out your posts now and then, but not every time every day you post. I have literally over 700 unread messages by people I know are just dropping links without a single word in steem.chat. Makes it hard to read messages of actual newcomers or people you do want to talk with, currently taking a small break from chat, lol.
Worst part is many of them know that at least half of my daily VP goes towards @ocd yet they still feel entitled to a chance to get an upvote - the worst part are those that never get enough. :/
This entitlement sentiment is actually the thing that upsets me like hell... I must admit I rarely connect to the steem chat, as we moved all our activities on discord (where we are also handling the complains better :p).
Sorry for the late answer, I was in offline mode for the Easter break ;)