Dear Steem investors, welcome to the Steem blockchain. We are 44 thousand active Steemians who post regularly valuable (and not so valuable content) to this marvelous ecosystem. This entire system depends on the voting power of all Steem holders. However, if you just let your Steem sit on an exchange or as liquid Steem in your Steem wallet then you will not be able to reap the fruits of your investment. This article will show you what to do with your Steem to get the greatest rewards for your money.
Power Up Your Steem
Steem is no simple pump and dump coin. Steem is the biggest social experiment in the history of mankind! It is an opportunity hub that connects people and creates financial stability for its participants and their projects. With the Steem Power that comes from vesting your liquid Steem for at least 13 weeks into the ecosystem thousands of peoples lifes will be changed and you can earn incredible returns for your investment. You will never loose any of Steem Power when you interact with the Steem blockchain mechanics. You will only make more.
To do so send your Steem to your Steemit account. If you haven't created one yet it will take a few days via Steemit or pay 6 Steem for it and get it immediately. Just use the withdraw function of your exchange and enter the name of your account. When it arrives you can go to your wallet and click on your Steem. A dropdown will reveal the Power Up function. You will need your Steemit password or your private Active key which you will find in your wallet under permissions.
1) Curation Rewards
The first big way to earn Steem for investors is by simply upvoting articles on Steemit, Busy, ChainBB, DTube, Utopian, dMania and many more. These are all websites that access the Steem blockchain in a different way. Check them out, they are all great. Find the content you like and upvote it. You will find a voting slider that allows you to control the upvote weight. 100% will be the biggest vote you can make which creates a Steem Dollar value depending on your Steem Power. Find out on SteemWorld how much yours is worth - I bet you are surprised!
When you upvote you will burn 2% of your voting power which will generate in 2.4 hours. That means you can and should use 20% of your voting power every day because that is as much as you regenerate each day in total. That equals 10 full 100% upvotes or many more with smaller percentages. You will earn curation rewards for each upvote depending on many factors. 25% of each post is designated for the curators. You will share that with all others and get more of the pool when you vote early and the post gets plenty of upvotes after you.
2) Curation Trails
If manually curating is too time consuming for you or if you trust the judgement of others better than you might be interested in curation trails. You can use tools like Steemauto to automatically upvote the posts that the leader of a trail you are following is upvoting. This is a popular mechanic on Steem and can be very profitable when you follow someone like @cryptoctopus or use the new 1UP curation system.
This will allow you to create even better curation rewards than doing it manually and just create a nice passive income of new Steem every day for you. All you have to do is collect your payouts and at the same time you can support great curation projects and the people who profit from them.
3) Vote Selling
Yes, that is indeed a thing and people are using this heavily to promote themselves and even make some profit with it. As a stakeholder of Steem Power you can use services like @minnowbooster or @smartsteem to sell your votes to their users. They will automatically send you your payouts and other people can use your upvotes to achieve greater visibility on the Steem community. On top of that you will still earn curation rewards.
You can even create a voting bot out of your account and run profitable bid-bots via the Steem Bot Tracker application. This is a goldmine with current high Steem Dollar (SBD) prices and will not require any marketing when listed on the tracker. This is a 24/7 money machine.
4) Delegation Selling
One of the amazing features of being a Steem power holder is delegating your power to others. It allows you to keep your stake but temporarily allow someone else to use it and earn curation rewards instead of yourself. This has become a profitable business for many Steem Power holders and Minnowbooster ( @minnowbooster ) and Blocktrades ( @blocktrades ) offer automated market places for that.
You will never loose any delegated Steem Power and you can always undelegate it again. keep in mind that your Steem Power will take one week before it returns to you from the moment you undelegated it. This helps to avoid gamification with that mechanic. During that time nobody can use your power. A popular field field for delegations are bid-bot holders who sell their votes in public bids several times each day.
5) Delegation Sponsorship
One of the finest way to use your Steem Power is by delegating it to a sponsorship program of one of the new Steem platforms like Utopian ( @utopian-io ), dMania ( @dmania ) or DTube ( @dtube ). They will use your Steem power to upvote the contributions to their platforms and help to grow their users. Utopian.io is the leader of this system with nearly 4 million delegated Steem Power and a return of 20% from the contributors posts. Check out this video for further instructions.
In my opinion this is the future of many new platforms based on Steem and you should make plenty of use of this opportunity because it will create a massive success for the platforms and that will increase the value of Steem and hence your investment. Utopian.io is creating thousands of new open source contributions each week and has become indeed a utopia for many content creators like myself.
6) Self Upvoting
It is your stake and you can do whatever you want with it. That includes self-upvoting as well. If you post your own proper articles and upvote them that is no problem. But don't be fooled into easy Steem by upvoting your own spam posts and comments: You will trigger the massive wrath of other stakeholders and they will flag you and take away all your upvotes effectively annulating your used voting power which will result in massive opportunity costs. So don't do it more than you give back in form of good content. It is also not good for the growth of the Steem blockchain if you just use your voting power on yourself and hence not in your own best interest.
Conclusion
The chances to make massive return of investments with Steem are hidden in Steem Power. Trust into the cryptocurrency you have acquired and use its power to earn more Steem by fueling the ecosystem with your upvote power and help to build the future of financial rewards, social media and decentralized information. There is money everywhere. Power up and get your share of it!
