Its not profitable to use upvote bots to upvote your post when your not getting 100% of the curation rewards. I used upvote bots for 6 straight days. Here are my results below.
Original investment 50 sbd
SBD loss 0.92
Original investment 3 sbd
SBD profit 1.09
Original investment 31 sbd
SBD loss 0.07
Original investment 20 sbd
SBD loss 0.02
Original investment 70 sbd
SBD loss 11.22
Original investment 50 sbd
SBD loss 1.25
Total = Loss of 10.55 SBD
I don't see the profitability in creating content then spending SBD or steem to upvote quality content and just breaking even or taking a loss. I will not spend any more money on upvote bots going forward. I will just hope that I can build followers and hopefully get my viewers to upvote post naturally. Its nice to see a post that has $200 total next to it but how much of that money is actually going to the author? Also is the author profitable on that post? probably not.
The process to make 100% on an article that you post is just about impossible.
Check out steemit FAQ
If curators vote for a post within the first 30 minutes of it being created, a portion of their curation reward is added to the author payout. This portion is linear to the age of the post between 0 and 30 minutes. As an example: upvoting at 15 minutes will donate half of your potential curation reward to the author.
If you can only make back 75% of what you spend on voting bots then you will always lose.
Someone on steemit help responded and said yes you can make 100% on an article but everyone has to vote immediately as soon as the post is published.