Not long ago, I asked the Steemit community what I should do with my supply of SBD.
One of the options presented was to use the SBDs to buy help from bots. I was hesitant to try this approach due to the controversy surrounding bot use on Steemit.
However, I found that a plurality of my followers largely supported the use of bots to help get my posts greater exposure. And this community support is what ultimately prompted me to dive in and try.
Here's what I learned.
Promotion Bots are Easy to Hire
Ordinarily, my posts earn rewards of somewhere between $3 and $5. The top end of that being exceptionally rare.
When I posted my Trollhunters review, I used promotion bots for the very first time.
I looked up these bots on Steembottracker.com. The two promotion bots they recommend are Minnowbooster and Smartmarket.
I gave a single SBD to each promoter, and found the process to be quite seamless. Minnowbooster gives you the option of just sending the money from your Steemit wallet, while both promoters offer the option to send the money through Steemconnect (which gave me no trouble at all).
Promotion Bots are Fair Players
One of the first things that happened, after hiring the promoters, was an unexpected partial refund.
Smartsteem returned .604 SBD, saying that it had promoted the post as much as it could, but was unable to give me 1 SBD worth.
Minnowbooster also returned .001 SBD after they were done promoting my post.
These events were, in a word, unexpected. I had imagined that whatever money I threw at promoters was just gone forever, and they would do as they saw fit afterwards. That they actually stopped me from overpaying was a bit of an eye-opening experience---one that went a long way in convincing me of the honesty of their business model.
Promotion Bots are (Mostly) Effective
That first post, in the end, netted nearly $9 on Steemit. I had payed 1.295 SBD for promotion services.
After taking into account the curator's share and all other considerations, it's fair to say that I turned a profit from my experiment. Not only did I make my money back overall, but I also made back more than double the amount in SBDs alone.
The experience also furthered my goal of increasing my Steemit reputation score, as the additional VESTS make each post more of a reputation booster.
When I tried promotion services a second time (for my Muppets: Infinity War, Part 1 post, the situation worked out even better, with me netting nearly $12 on Steemit.
The third time, however, was not quite as successful. Muppets: Infinity War, Part 2 only netted about $4 on Steemit. And that might have had something to do with the amount of other people using promotion services, or with the falling price of Steem (we've been getting hammered down by the market lately). Or it could just be an outlier.
Conclusion
In any case, it would appear that more research is needed before I can declare promotion bots to be a true solution or not. Luckily, I have a goodly supply of SBDs to keep experimenting with, with the hopes that I might establish myself as a Steemit personality.
I want everyone on the platform to at least be aware of my journey toward publication, because I want to bring the platform along with me, and use my book writing career to bring more attention to Steemit and the crypto universe. If promotion bots (and even other bots) are needed to make that happen, then I need to at least entertain the idea of using them.
Let me know what you think in the comments.