What is curating posts? Well curating posts is that you read posts by others and if you value the information given in that post you can up vote it and leave a (meaningful) comment. When you leave a vote you help other users with identifying great content that is worth their time. But of course this will be rewarded because you, as curator, have to read through new posts and identify the value in it which costs you time and saves time for others.
Basic: What are curation rewards exactly?
A curation reward is when you receive when you vote on a post. At least 50% of the rewards of that post will go to the author (so it pays of the be a curator and an author. The other 50% is divided between the author, the curators (the people that vote) and the commenters. Good to know is that the curation rewards are paid out in Steem Power (not steem dollars, SBD). This Steem Power increases the power of your up votes so you can help the authors of the post even more with greater rewards and help yourself in the process.
Voting, or better yet Curating.
Voting reduces the amount of Voting Power you have. With HF19 (Hard Fork 19) each vote you give will reduce your voting power with 2% and with each percentage that goes away the rewards you give during voting will reduce as well. With HF19 it’s recommended to vote 10 times a day for maximum profit.
Voting power replenishes at a steady rate over the course of 5 days. Each day it will replenish 20% voting power, no matter what.
Be the best curator there is!
“I want to be the very best!” Well you can be! But then you have to know the best strategy there is for curating. Wanna know the secret? Alright let’s go!
0 - 15 Minutes: The author receives 99% of the curation rewards.
15 - 30 Minutes: The author receives 50% and 50% will be distributed among the curators.
30+ Minutes: The curator gets 100%. This is the best to do!
So for the maximum rewards and the ideal moment you have to curate a post that is 30 minutes old, has only 1 vote (yet) from the author itself and makes tons of money over the course of 7 days. But speaking realistically now, that will never happen! Especially with the influx of new people every day.
So for the best rewards you have to read articles and check their value, then check out the author if he is pretty good and the monitor the first voters that came in the first minutes. If the post gets a lot of votes in the first minutes, DON’T WAIT till the 30 minute mark and just pop in. Because 50% is better than 0% - 20% ;)
Some final tips. The TL;DR
Vote on posts that have value and you believe that others will vote for as well.
Don’t up vote content that’s already popular.
Vote on content as early as possible (Most likely from 15+ minutes)
Get as much Vesting Steem Power as you can get!!