I have over 1200 fans but my organic reach is next to nothing.

If I don't pay a bid bot I would literally earn maybe 1 cent per post. If I write for an hour and get paid 1 cent for my time there's little incentive to write more. I believe this is for a number of reasons. 1 being that I signed up a year ago to steemit and maybe many of my followers have quit or become inactive since then, that could explain it. The 2nd factor I believe is that not many people use the newsfeed because of how much spam and trash is in there. The 3rd reason I can think of is that people are so overly concerned about following their own accounts they reserve no time to participate in other people's posts.

So, I'm basically screwed into writing short posts in the fear that if I spend too much time on a post that will most likely never get seen I'll be wasting my time and getting paid worse than someone picking cotton in the 3rd world.

So what's a brother to do?

Well I'll tell ya, I end up spending more time on facebook and my websites because they get tons more reach and earn me a lot more money, and for life, not just 7 days. So clearly steemit has some downfalls which prevent some people moving over here exclusively. Sure, I could share my steemit posts to facebook to get more traffic and potential fans but facebook completely blocks the reach from steemit. So that's out of the question.

So how are people getting so many upvotes on their posts "organically"?

Apparently, the norm here is to join 30 discord groups and beg like a peasant to them all for upvotes, which in my opinion is spammy and degrading. In the end it's just easier to get a couple bid bots to help push up your post in the hopes someone might see it separated from the piles of garbage people post on steemit. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesnt. But what else can you do?

Fix the steemit newsfeed!

That's one thing steemit could upgrade. It could try a bit harder to push up posts that each user is actually interested in by cross referencing similar post tags from users and followers. Like facebook, I will see more posts from people I interact with or more posts from topics I enjoy. Just a thought.

So What Bots Do I Use an Which Are The Best?

That's simple, I only use 2 right now because @randowhale is offline. Randowhale has always been great, but I mainly use @booster and @minnowbooster and they both are pretty damn good. I would recommend reading their blogs and checking their websites before you use them to fully understand how they work. I usually send 1.0 SBD to minnowbooster and 1.0 to 5.0 SBD to booster. They are the only ones that consistently give a return on my send. And considering no one ever sees my posts there's little other way besides spamming and begging discord groups to get any eyes on my posts.

I understand many people are against the bid bots, but what's a guy to do given all this info?

And one last reason I use them is because I feel my posts are about awareness and activism, making the world a better place, not bragging about my life or what I'm eating. In other words, I'm not just upvoting trash, I actually think the world can be a much better place if more people saw my posts. That is all.

To prove my point I won't use any bid bots on this post for at least 4 hours. And yes I have tried posting at different times. I'm pretty baffled that none of my followers see my posts. So that's why I wrote this, to be open and transparent.

Feel free to leave some feedback and follow @thedonfreeman to see more of my posts.