When a new user registers on steemit.com the first thing he usually does is to start voting on as many posts as he can hoping that this will help him/her earn more Steem Power, but that is simply not going to happen. Voting on too many posts is not only not going to help you initially, but will actually make it worse for you as you will be diluting your initial voting power.
Every new user that registers on steemit.com gets a $10 Steem Dollar equivalent for free that is invested in Steem Power, so you start with 3 Steem Power already available in your account. This is your initial influence on the platform, your voting power starts at 100%, but as soon as you start casing a lot of votes it starts to get lower and lower and with each next vote you make your influence is diminishing as well as your voting power. The voting power regenerates in the course of a day unless you spend it too fast voting to allow it to increase back to the maximum level.
So instead of voting for hundreds of articles when you start using steemit.com you can just choose 10 or 20 maximum really quality ones with high potential and vote only for them for the whole day. The next day you can do the same and this way your power per vote will be higher and the chance that you will get rewarded for your votes properly as well
There are some services out there that allow you to check what is your maximum voting power worth and how much is the current voting power worth as well as what percentage is the voting power you have at the moment (it is wise not to go below 30%). One such website is SteemDollar.com, where you can just type in your username and see the results for your voting power.
If you have 100% voting power and at that level one of your votes is worth 0.01 Steem Dollars, then if you vote for a publication on steemit.com you will add that amount to the reward pot of the post. Then after 12 hours when the first round of rewards for that post is being distributed mostly to the author and some percentage of it going to the voters you will have a higher chance of getting a reward and it will be higher than if you have voted at just 30% voting power for example.
So vote wise and for just a few quality articles per day that look promising, you help yourself and the community!