Make Easy Money By Choosing Likely Winners
Voting Cheat Sheet: How to Follow Steemit’s All Star Posters
Make Easy Money By Choosing Likely Winners
By Richard Kaplan, @steemship
This guide is intended for beginners, users with little money, and anyone wishing to make money by upvoting content rather than writing lost posts like this one. By now, you’ve probably read the Steemit Whitepaper. It is an amazing, revolutionary document. But even if you understand the technical jargon, what does it mean for you? How do you make real money on Steemit? Do you have to post content? NO. THERE IS AN EASIER WAY!
All you need to do is upvote a number of popular posts per day, and get in early. Then spend the rest of your votes (no more than 20 per day total) upvoting posts from new users, poor users, and users posting great blog content. The first votes will make you good money and the others will help build Steemit.
I have spent the last week or two reading and re-reading the whitepaper, then digging through old blog posts and replies on the BitShares forum and here on Steemit. I’ve finally understood how voting works and what a huge moneymaking opportunity it offers.
This information is hard to come by in any accessible, readable form, so let me share with you what I’ve learned.
At this early stage of Steemit, there is some huge money to be made simply from upvoting good content. And doing so while a blog post is fresh.
But how do you know it’s good? Mining for hidden gems is not easy, but when you learn to vote smart, you will double, triple, or even tentuple your voting income.
If you read this guide, you can make highly educated guesses with your upvotes. You’ll be right more often than not, which means you should make some good money at the next payout. Let me show you how to get paid really well for those votes.
First, let’s look at what the co-founder and CTO, Dan Larimer, has written about voting in an old, buried post that deserves more attention (link at end of this posting):
“Every time a post gets paid, 50% of the payout is directed toward those who contributed the most to increasing the posts payout. For those who don’t care how it works and just want some basic rules to follow, here are some guidelines:
- Only vote on posts that you believe others will also vote for.
- Vote as early as possible after the content is posted.
- Don’t vote on content that is already popular
- Acquire as much Steem Power as possible
- Vote for less than 50 posts per day
- Avoid downvoting”
Let’s examine each of those statements in turn, so we can understand his advice for voting.
1 and 3. ‘Only vote on posts you believe will be popular.’ That’s why I wrote this guide for you, so that you can predict quite reliably which posts will be popular. It pays to spot a winner before everyone else has. More on that soon.
‘Vote as early as possible on the will-be-popular posts’. If you are the first user to upvote something that becomes popular, you will get a larger payout on it than later upvoters will get. The first voter is most heavily rewarded, followed by the second and then subsequent posters. Of course, how much of the post’s 50% you get will also depend on your voting weight (see # 4 and # 5 for more on this).
‘Get as much STEEM Power as possible.’ Your voting power is magnified, the more STEEM Power you have. Definitely Power Up as much as you can. That’s not investment advice, and you must make your own decision. This could be a volatile place to put your money, though most of us think it’s an upward volatility. If you believe in Steemit and see it growing much bigger, as I do, it’s a fact that any STEEM Power you have (as you add more with Power Ups) gives you greater and greater amounts of leverage with your votes.
‘Vote for less than 50 posts per day’. I’m not sure why he quoted the number 50. The system is programmed, as I understand it, to expect you to vote 20 times per day. Here is what he wrote on that:
“Users that have made a multi-year commitment to Steem by converting their STEEM to Steem Power have the ability to vote on posts. The weight of each vote is proportional to how much Steem Power you have divided by the average number of votes you cast in the last 24 hours. If you have cast less than 20 votes in the last 24 hours then 20 will be considered your average.”
So if you are looking to make money by mining for hidden gems, I would vote a lot less than 50 times, and 20 seems to make pretty good sense.
- ‘No downvoting’. Somehow, it hurts your voting strength more than it helps Steemit. Don’t do it.
Conclusions: Vote Early on posts with a high chance of becoming popular, but don’t vote that often: 20 times a day is enough. The more STEEM Power you have, the more voting leverage your upvotes will have.
How to Share the All Stars’ Payments by Upvoting Them
Here is the basic process. You have three main choices of method, or you can use some combination of the three:
Method 1: Select the “Created” category to view the posts. It shows the newest, most recent posts. Imagine this “Created” view is the front door of Steemit and everyone who wants to come in is entering through this doorway. The content can come through very quickly, though. And let’s face it, there’s a lot of junk to sort through.
When I started in Steemit, this was the place to be. It’s still a fun place to visit. But if you are watching out for posts during prime time (currently, that’s evening in the United States), it’s a little like trying to grab rubber ducks out of a fast moving river. And the pace will increase there as Steemit continues to grow.
If you are lurking in this area, mining for hidden gems, the first thing you want to look for is the poster’s name (see below for a master list of the most frequent and highest-paid posters). The second thing you want to look for is whether a new post has gotten any upvotes yet. If it’s brand new and it already has two or three upvotes, you need to add your vote ASAP.
Method 2: Find the most frequently posting, top-paid posters below and “follow” them by checking their user pages frequently. Each user’s page is steemit.com/@username (substitute actual username there). And each one will show the list of that user’s blog posts, which you can sort from the drop-down menu just like the main page (selecting “Created” would show most recent first).
You can try out my user page as an example:
https://steemit.com/@steemship
If you took the Top 10 or 12 blog posters and either bookmarked or checked their user pages once a day or a few times a week, you might discover their new blog postings before others do (especially if they are posting in odd categories).
Method 3: Comb through the topics (which are really just # tags now). The new ranking algorithms make the lists of leading posts less dynamic. The developers are still playing with this, but we have seen “Active”, “Trending”, and “Hot” rankings available lately.
No matter what they call these, the top postings in these lists don’t change as much as before. And a lot of the content is older. So newer content is really buried in there. It’s harder to find than before, unless you are viewing the “Created” category as in Method 1, above.
The trouble with monitoring the “Created” (recent posts) page is that the volume of new posts is increasing quickly as Steemit attracts more users, so it’s hard to keep up with the good content you might be missing. New posts just drop down too soon now, whether they’re good or not.
Solution: start using the topics on the right. You do this on Reddit by following certain subs, and the time has come to browse the categories here also. A handful of these are more active than others. The obvious place to start is with # steem; it has much more traffic and posts than most other topics, though it contains a lot of junk postings also. You can ignore most of the memes and questions people post there, few of which will be upvoted.
Also, many of the top-grossing, frequent posters tend to favor certain topics (these # tags have a space after the symbol so that this posting does not get filed with the topic tags I’m writing about).
For example, @officialfuzzy usually posts in # beyondbitcoin, being the host of that show. Beyond Bitcoin is beloved by the Steemit community, many of whom started with Bitshares. This guy was working for free over there for years, building up a ton of good will, which he’s cashing in now. Fuzzy’s going to get his upvotes. His highest-paid post so far is at $3,000 and just look at all his other posts: barely a shutout among them. Almost every single one is making real money, some of them really nice money. So you can profit consistently if you find Fuzzy’s posts early. Keep an eye out for new stuff in # beyondbitcoin.
Similarly @masteryoda often sticks to the # photography category, where many of his pictures are very highly paid. This guy gets as much as $3,000-5,000 just for posting a pic that may have a short description. Look at the ones that do well. They are really nice pictures, National Geographic-type stuff. It’s of a better quality than most of the material people are posting. Yoda is a Steemit witness, and a number of people here know him, hence that cache attracts the upvotes. You can try to copy his style, since he doesn’t have to write much, but you can make a good chunk of his income just by following and quickly upvoting his submissions.
A more frequent poster, @donkeypong, writes the new blog newsletter in the # blogspotlight category and contest post was tagged with # steem. They are new, so I’m assuming he continues both. This is another poster who was known to the BitShares community and he’s giving away some upvote cash for bloggers, so he has street cred with a lot of Steemit voters. Not all his posts are winners, but how about those $10,000 and $5,000 ones. Half of that money is paid to the upvoters. Wouldn’t you like to be one of the users who saves up his voting power and punches in an upvote for a soon-to-be $10,000 post? That’s the same as mining a nugget of gold, there’s no difference.
Similarly, @nextgencrypto posts in multiple categories, but probably half his posts have category tags for either # steem or # technology. Next Gen, a Steemit witness, has a nearly unbelievable $14,000 blog post to his name and a near-record number of others in the $300-$500 range. When you are mining for hidden gems, @nextgencrypto is a very good name to look out for. Even if you don’t get a piece of a $14,000 post, upvoting his stuff early can get you a lot of chances to piggyback on posts that are worth hundreds of dollars. These are pretty consistent over time.
Steemit was founded in the United States. The community members come from many other countries, but the non-English language categories are slower to develop. As they do, these language categories will be dominated by a handful of posters. Once there are enough members, these leaders will be getting most of the upvotes for a while.
There is a poster named @clayop who is a Steemit witness. This guy will jumpstart the Korean community on Steemit, just like he did on BitShares. Look for the categories or tags which start with # ko-, such as # ko-general and # ko-announcements. Very soon, @clayop’s Korean posts will start to get more votes, and don’t ignore his English posts either, which so far are drawing stronger voting. His highest-paid post netted over $7,000 and he’s had multiple posts over $500. Get in there and add your votes early. If you’re ethical about knowing what you vote on, then paste any foreign language post into Google translate and it will give you the general meaning.
Those are just a few examples, and the Master List has some more names to “follow” for a very realistic chance at making serious money from upvotes. Unfortunately, Steemit doesn’t have a “follow” or “friend” function (yet?), like a Twitter or Facebook. If it had this feature, I would follow everyone on the Master List below.
You’ll just have to watch out for them and pounce with your upvotes!
Look for when a particular poster is usually online. Steemit’s largest user base is still in the United States by far; prime time is the evening hours in North American time zones. This is when fewer people are working are in school, so they have more time to devote to Steemit.
Steemit’s clock time stamps each message in the Universal Time (UTC) and you can find the current UTC time online by searching for it in Google, “time UTC”. However, the older a posting gets, the tougher it is to figure out what time it came in, because they will just list “4 days ago”.
There may be some logic to the dates, though. If you keep an eye on certain posters, you may see that some have a pattern. Certain people take weekends off while others post more frequently then. In terms of dates, @officialfuzzy and @donkeypong have a show and newsletter with a weekly schedules (I’m expecting donkey is continuing weekly with that newsletter), so expect some posts roughly a week after the previous week’s similar posts, maybe late in the week. @officialfuzzy usually posts a call for questions for the weekly hangout, then sometimes a summary after his show.
Before we get to my master list of All Star Posters , let me share the criteria I used to create it.
-- these are sourced based on which posters had ‘platinum hit singles’: top voted posts on the Top Votes ranking page. I probably missed some other good posters that way, but these are the obvious stars so far. My eyes went blurry after I added the first 25 posters or so from the Top Votes page, and then I eliminated many for the reasons stated below.
--limited to blog posts; does not count replies to others’ blog posts; most users post replies more frequently than blog posts, and they rarely get many votes for replies.
--poster must have more than 10 blog posts to his name; there are some high rankers with 3 posts or 5 posts or more, but they aren’t prolific enough to bother following, you could be waiting on them for months; also, some of the witnesses were highly paid for a very small number of early “please vote for me” and “witness intro” posts; this gave a handful of people a distorted average, so I used 10 as the cutoff.
--poster must have at least 3 posts to his credit that are each worth $50 or more (this leaves out ‘one hit wonders’)
--poster’s average $$$ per post must be over $100
--tried to eliminate and exclude any obvious test posts, not factoring them into a poster’s overall count or average
With that in mind, here are the top blog posters to vote for if you want to make good money:
Posters Most Likely to Make You Money on Upvotes
Top blog posters to upvote (most frequent AND highest paid, but sorted by frequency). Location is provided in the list, if known, so you can guess times they may be online.
- @dan, @dantheman, @ned, @ned-reddit-login, any other accounts associated with the founders. Locations: U.S. (Virginia and New York).
- @steemrollin, 70 blog posts, average payment per post (PPP) $239. Solid gold. Upvote this guy’s stuff and it’s hard to be wrong. https://steemit.com/@steemrollin
- @clains, 57 blog posts, average PPP $162. Also seems to use @psylains. Hit-or-miss; some ‘meaning of life’ philosophy posts don’t get votes. Location: Norway. https://steemit.com/@clains
- @donkeypong, 47 blog posts, average PPP $459. Writes blog newsletter. Uptrending: five of last seven posts hit $100 or more. Posts in categories: # steem, # blogspotlight, others. Location: U.S., West Coast. https://steemit.com/@donkeypong
- @clayop, 32 blog posts, average PPP $361. Delegate, leader in Korea. Safe bet to upvote English posts now, Korean posts as that community grows. Location: South Korea. https://steemit.com/@clayop
- @nextgencrypto, 21 blog posts, average PPP $1273. Delegate. Another solid gold pick. Almost everything is red hot. Location: Probably U.S., California. https://steemit.com/@nextgencrypto
- @masteryoda, 20 blog posts, average PPP $590. Posts mostly in photography. If you see a good pic or something written elsewhere, upvote it fast. Location: Dagobah. https://steemit.com/@masteryoda
- @officialfuzzy, 19 posts, average PPP $357. Beyond Bitcoin host. Community loves him, so upvote before they do. Location: U.S., Tennessee. https://steemit.com/@officialfuzzy
- @pharesim, 12 blog posts, average PPP $624. Witness and developer, really good blogs, solid bet. https://steemit.com/@pharesim
- @dele-puppy, 12 blog posts, average PPP $466. Witness who created first registration bot, solid bet if he continues to post. https://steemit.com/@dele-puppy
- @arhag, 12 posts, average PPP $442. Witness and developer, very intelligent writer, solid bet. https://steemit.com/@arhag
- @blocktrades, 11 blog posts, average PPP $2573. Operates the major currency bridge/ramp into Steemit. Solid bet if you see an announcement or update post. https://steemit.com/@blocktrades
Apportioning votes and spreading them out
Now that you know how to make good money by picking the most likely winners, remember that newer posters, poorer users, and great blog posts also deserve votes. The only way Steemit will grow is by rewarding a wider range of posters, not just the All Stars listed above. Vote for them and make your money, but that probably won’t exhaust your daily voting power. Remember, you have about 20 votes per day.
I think that all of us should commit to using a certain percentage of our upvotes to support newer posters, poorer users, and great blog posts. Maybe you use 50% of your votes to make money and the other 50% to help Steemit grow in this way. Or maybe you use 75/25, 25/75, or some other ratio. The best ratio is what’s right for you.
If you are a new user or a poor user who needs to increase your STEEM Power, then I wrote this guide for you. You are entitled to use these tricks to make as much money from upvoting the All Stars as you can. But don’t forget to give back to your community also. Giving back means spreading around the rest of your votes to reward those who deserve them. That will help Steemit grow in the right direction.
--Yours truly, Richard, @steemship
References:
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/how-to-maximize-curation-rewards
https://steemit.com/steem/@liondani/steem-whitepaper-download
General background references, in addition to th whitepaper linked above, include a number of additional postings on Steemit and BitShares Talk Forums.