RE: Why I Stopped Upvoting Myself On Steemit
I tried this for a while last week and found that it was significantly reducing my ability to keep a self-sustaining rewards cycle going. Since right now everything coming into my account goes to growing my SP (or a curation initiative) I figure that if one self-vote per day makes me more money than it's worth by going onto my post immediately, it's essentially worth more than one vote I can give out to someone else later.
My voting power has been rapidly growing as I get back delegations I made when I first bought in, and I'm not entirely comfortable with it, so I'm also not yet as effective at giving out my votes as I would like to be. It may be that as I get more used to that I will want more of my voting power for that purpose. There's a new minnow-encouraging curation initiative run by @elsiekjay that I want to support, so that will help in getting the votes out.
I think you should upvote your posts for now until you grow more Steem Power. Self-upvoting posts is perfectly acceptable on Steemit, although self-upvoting your own comments is kind of frowned upon. There are a lot of people who leave meaningless comments all over other peoples blogs just so they can upvote themselves and that is not really cool, but upvoting your own posts is perfectly fine.
As you grow and perhaps create your own community that could change in the future.
Here's a really cool site about Steemit Ettiquette you may find helpful.