How, When and Why You Need to Plan Your Steem Growth

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As the correction wave of the cryptocurrency market reaches for it's end, and we prepare for the next impulse wave, It's important to have a plan for every outcome.

Steem does well here, because no matter what happens with the price of Steem, there is always opportunity to grow your Steem legitimately.

Let's look at some different ways you can grow Steem (Power) and/or Steem Dollars.

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Curation Rewards

This is an option available to anyone with Steem Power, but is often the least profitable unless you are strategic with your timing.

Aside from people who do this manually, there are also a number of bot accounts with a large amount of Steem Power, programmed to selectively upvote posts when they are 30 minutes old, based on a number of criteria.

You want to be voting after a post is 30 minutes old to be entitled to the most curation possible. If you were to vote on a post just after it is submitted, then all the curation for your vote would go to the author. The percentage starts at 0, and scales up to 25% as the post gets older. At the 30 minute mark, you're good to go.

Author Rewards

This is an option available to anyone with a Steem Account and a working keyboard of some kind. This is straight forward. Any blog or comment you submit will be entitled to at least 75% of the total reward received from upvotes.

How you get those upvotes is up to you.

• you can buy them
• you can gain followers by writing good content and those followers might upvote you
• you can use steemfollower that gives you points for upvoting others through their site, which earns upvotes from other Steemians also using steemfollower
• you can upvote yourself, getting curation and author rewards for your upvote

The worst thing you can do is just expect people to find your post and upvote it. Sadly, you can write the absolute best posts in the world, but get zero upvotes. That's reality on this platform, and it's reality on any social media platform. You have to promote yourself in some manner to grow on any platform.

Reporting Steem Abuse

This option is available to everyone. Steemcleaners have an abuse reporting tool (link at the bottom of this post) where you can report all manner of exploits and abuse. Plagiarism, spam and comment farming are just a few. Steem is a platform that runs on "Proof of Brain," so Steem abusers are those who gain Steem Power and Steem Dollars without providing that proof. Report that abuse to @steemcleaners through their abuse reporting tool, and maybe a week or two later you'll be rewarded with some Steem Power. For someone just starting out, it's quite a bit of Steem Power, and it's helping to clean up the garbage on Steem and make it a better place for legitimate content creators.

Arbitrage

If you already have lots of liquid Steem or Steem Dollars, you can play the long game of trading back and forth between the two. Currently, Steem is worth $3.32 and SBD is worth $2.70 on the open market. A month ago, the price difference was reversed. Someone could have sold 100 SBD for 130 Steem then, and now they could sell that 130 Steem for around 160 SBD. This game of leapfrogging between the two currencies takes a lot of patience, self-control and faith that history will repeat itself.

If the price of Steem is low enough, you can even gain twice by buying upvotes that will slowly over time turn SBD into Steem Power, which can then be powered down and used to buy more SBD if it's cheaper than Steem. This option is great only if the price of Steem is below a certain amount. In my case, I consider upvote buying to be useful in this scenario if Steem is below $3.60 on the open market, and SBD is worth less than Steem.

While it sounds simple enough in theory, it really takes a lot of self control to follow through on this strategy, because a lot can happen between the time you write a post, and seven days later when you get paid.

Selling Your Vote

This is a good option for anyone holding more than a few hundred Steem Power - real or delegated. If you have thousands of Steem Power, it might be best to head on over to steembottracker.com and get yourself set up as a full time Bid Bot. This takes some skill, and also requires some degree of baby sitting to clean up any mess when something goes wrong, like someone not getting their upvote, or getting ripped off. Stuff like that.

There is also smartsteem and minnowbooster services that can use your account as an upvote bot, and you get 85% of the SBD people pay for your upvote.

Delegating Steem Power

If you don't have time to post on Steem and you have lots of Steem Power, People on minnowbooster will pay you to delegate your Steem Power to them.

On the flip side, you can delegate your Steem Power to a Bid bot and get upwards of 95% or even 100% of their profit, depending on the bot.

In both cases, it's important to remember that when you stop delegating any amount of Steem Power, it takes 7 days for that Steem Power to be usable by you again.

Buy Low, Sell High

This is a long game and can be very profitable. All markets have volatility, and periods where the price goes up (bull market), and periods where the price goes down (bear market). In truth, this is what is known as going long, and is what investors are doing with most cryptocurrencies. Steem is the rare exception because you can generate Steem by other means, not just HODLing.

This strategy takes a lot of patience and time, not to mention risk taking. If you buy when the price is high, you technically made a bad call. Those new to investing do this all the time, where they buy the excitement. Then the price drops and they sell on fear. Don't be that guy/gal. Those are the investors that make the rest of us money, at least if we can avoid buying the hype and selling on fear.

Buy the Fear (not investment advice), and then sell to those who are buying the hype later. It sounds cruel and exploitative, but then so is competitive poker, or horse betting, or any other kind of gambling.

Not only can you make a lot of money if you buy low and sell high, but you can then reinvest when the price is low again. This will have a compounding effect. Buy 100 coins of something @ a dollar each. Sell them for 5 dollars later on. Then, a few months later buy 500 coins for a dollar each. rinse and repeat.

But how do you know when the price is high or low? When is the right time to buy or sell? (in my opinion) Learning how to read charts and the ins and outs of technical analysis (TA) is the best place to start. Anyone that says TA is useless are not going to make money in the crypto market unless they get really lucky, or they are following the advice of someone else that understands TA. It's pretty much that simple.

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In summary, there are many different ways you can legitimately grow your Steem. Some ways can be combined with others, such as selling your vote through minnowbooster or smartsteem, then using those instant earnings to buying upvotes through the same service.

While this may not seem like the intended use of the platform, the truth is that human beings will always follow the path of least resistance, and without bid bots, minnowbooster, blocktrades, smartsteem, steemfollower and other services, there would be a lot of people upvoting themselves instead. That's just the reality if it. No matter the restrictions someone tries to impose on Steemians, the end result would be the same: restrictions only strangle the platform to death.

The absolute best way for most of us to deal with Steem abuse when we see it, is to use the Steemcleaners reporting tool. The worst thing that can be done is forming gangs to dole out street justice; it just doesn't work on Steem.

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Thank you for reading. Try to keep your head attached in these crazy and blood-thirsty crypto markets.

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Steem Guides (in reading order):
For Dummies: How Steem Post Payouts Work
Upvote Buying & the Steem Power Snowball Effect
How to Help Clean Up (and Profit From) Steem Abuse

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Want to make money while helping to clean the garbage up on Steem? Report plagiarism, theft, tag abuse, comment spam, post spam, and other Steem abuse that degrades the Steem Platform to @steemcleaners with their reporting tool. If you provide good evidence, they will investigate and deal with the abuser. A week or two later they usually reward you in Steem Power. It's a win-win for everyone, just don't abuse the abuse reporting tool itself.

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Want to grow your steem power faster?
try smartsteem
and steemfollower

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Tip Jar:

Dogecoin DDizpbLrYzFNEZtEVvUXo8kKBKu3K7yLry

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As always; good luck, good wealth and good health to everyone on Steemit. Stay positive towards others and help the community grow.

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