This evening Steemit, i would like to talk about upvoting bots, how and why i use them and why i have decided to stop using upvoting services for the rest of the month. (Precious & rewards-pool excluded).

My Upvote Bot Journey with..

In the beginning

I am on steemit around 11 months now and i would say that i have been using upvoting bot services on all of my posts for the past 10 months. In the beginning like many other new users, i was getting very small payments and could not afford to use any upvoting service, the only way for me to get exposure was to be seen by making lots of posts and writing comments on others posts. I was making alot of silver related posts, 3-4 per day just to get me name seen and gather up some followers. @clumsysilverdad left me a comment and was the member that turned me to #steemsilvergold so ya'll have him to thank for having to put up with my ass the past 1o months. After joining Steemsilvergold, i was getting much better payouts of maybe 10-15 cent per post thanks to the like of @raybrockman, @fat-elivs, @hr1 and few others that are no longer here. I was pulling in around 0.50-0.90 SBD per day in rewards and it was time to start using bots. The very first bot i used was randowhale which cost 0.5 SBD at the time. I used to get a real buzz watching my post reward jump from 8 cent upto £1.10 in a blink of an eye. I was upvoting 1 post per day and made sure to always select what i thought was the best post with the most effort put in. After a few weeks of this and spending all my SBD on randowhale services, i was doing 2 posts per day and watching how my SP rewards were slowly growing in my excel sheet. I knew from then that all the SBD i ever got paid out would in future would go back into boosting my posts payouts and growing my account status. I wanted a 6 figure account and i was ready to put the work in and reinvest everything back in. I was around 8 weeks into my steemit journey by this time and it was time to get serious.

The Grinding times

Anyone that remembers using randowhale will also remember that the bot was offline around 18 hours every day and the very best time to use it was when it first woke up as this is when it had the greatest voting power. I was already using randowhale on all my posts by now and has spare SBD over so i started to look into other services and ended up finding bellyrub which has since gone busto due to dodgy accounting. This was the first bid vote service i used were users place a bid and receive a % payout every 2.4 hours. At the time i was doing 3 posts a day, writing back to all my comments and making myself useful for the community while also upvoting each post with a 1 sbd randowhale and 1-2 sbd upvote from bellyrub as well. During this time i was watching my monthly earned SP grow month on month every month and this has become my main reason for using upvoting bots since. I was watching the amount of SP i earned in the post rewards more than the amount of SBD i would earn. As i took on more community roles and stayed consistent with content, things slowly snowballed and each day i would grow my account a little bit more. I was using a range of upvoting bots and my posts were starting to appear higher in the steemsilvergold treading listings. I was slowly building more SP from higher post payments and things were going smoothly. This was my ''golden time'' on steemit where i have built my strongest bonds with other members and all the basis tricks of the trade. Things are always changing and the good times had to end for the great times began. There was a game changer in the distance to mix things up and rock the boat.

The times of Stax

We all know the story but when Stax was first introduced it was amazing. Pay once per month and receive an upvote every day. No more having to spend 20 minutes every day sending url's to other services. At around this time the SBD to Steem ratio was going crazy and i was building steem like it was out of fashion. Others were converting there SBD to lock in cheap steem but i took the gamble and continued to use upvoting services and because the ratio stayed out of line for so long, it paid off big time for me. Less people were using upvoting services because they were cashing out and i was getting 300% returns from upvote bots and watching SP earned from posts moon. I decided to go for a silver tier membership with Stax and continued to use upvoting bots, mainly minnowbooster and smartsteem. I won an a Stax upgrade contest and advanced to gold tier for around 2 weeks which was a real boast to my payouts. I have been lucky in a few ways and the cards have fallen well for me. I wanted to remain a gold member but the cost was 100 steem per month. I planned to convert 4 SBD everyday in steem and use the rest of my payout on upvoting services. As the ratio from SBD to Steem was so high, by the end of the month of Dec, i have saved up over 260 steem. I paid my 100 to Stax and cashed the rest to buy other crypto's. We were all earning so much so easy back then for those 8-10 weeks, it started to look like it would never end so why not cash some out? I had became a member of #thealliance and delegated 50sp to their mothership bot. The next few months i stuck to the basic plan of convert 4 SBD per day into steem and spend the rest on upvoting services. At the end of the month i would send 100 steem to Stax and spend the rest on other cryptos. Everything was going good even with the slow decline in SBD to steem ratio but then again, things happened and things changed as a result. We had a community meeting and then the times of Stax was over.

The time of ssg-community

These are the times of today and they are good times. After @ssg-community was built as a true community bot i decided to delegate 500SP i had built up that would reduce my monthly cost. By staying on gold tier and spending around 5-6 SBD per day on minnowbooster, i will earn around 100-120 SP per month in post payouts. My true organic post payout would be a around 80 cent to $1.50 per post. I am sure alot of you might be shocked to hear that as i always get around $10-25 from my posts. If i was to do 1 post per day, my payout would show as around $20. My gold tier upvote is around $8 and spending $6 on minnowbooster gets me around $12 giving me $18 from upvoting services. The other $2 is real upvotes. I am am still on the grind but using upvoting bots has become a way to purely earn more SP from post outs. This month i delegated another 500SP to ssg-community and im currently building my next 500 delegation which will take 4-5 months. Some members on here might think im like a big player because i am so involved in the Steemsilvergold community but it does not cost anything to be involved and all my work the past 11 months have given me 1100 SP and around £1000 withdrawn. My new plan is to stay on the grind, build SP until i have 2500 with Ssg-communuty and then make a new plan.

Maybe new times are here

With the recent decline in the ratio between SBD and Steem, i have seen a steep fall in the amount of SP earned from post payouts and recycling SBD into upvoting bots is looking less attractive to me. I am going to mix it up for the rest of this month and not use other upvoting bots. I can see from steem.supply that i am due 54 SBD in post rewards over the next week. With the little steem i already have that should get me to the 65 Steem i need for next month's ssg-community gold tier. From last night i am converting all SBD in steem until i have paid for next months gold tier and this months group crypto buy. After they are paid for, i will let the SBD balance grow. On the 1st of July, i will take whatever amount of SBD i have and divide that number that into 7. I will use that amount for minnowbooster every day over the next week then stop using minnowbooster and start collecting SBD again. My thinking is i can boost my first week enough to pay me out enough for my gold tier and the rest is gravy. Im not sure if that makes sense. I plan to use upvoting services for the first week of each month and then convert all the SBD rewards to pay for my gold tier and monthly crypto buy. I will then grow my SBD balance till the end of the month and use the balance for the first week of the next month. I would hope the amount of SBD i can save every month grows meaning less time converting SBD into Steem meaning more time growing my SBD balance and rinse and repeat. I going to give it a try and see who it works out. It might be a bad idea but it might be genius. I will likely make post updates of how it going.

To date,i have spend a total of £5291.53 on upvoting services

while my SP is worth around £1809.43. Lets see if i can get that number a little closer while still building my account. I know we need to spend to earn but im not looking to earn, im looking to grow. I knew that might sound like jibberish and it most likely is but it sounds deep, lol.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Its something i have been write about for a while.