Further to my post of Steemit tips yesterday, I don't want to discourage voting, but if you are doing it to try and make money then you need to have a strategy.
Disclaimer: I may get some of the details wrong, but these are the principles as I understand them. Please correct me if I have anything wrong.
- Voting with 10SP means you need to be lucky. If you don't have much Steem Power then you can't expect to make much. The split of voting rewards takes this into consideration. I didn't start to make anything until I had at least 100 SP. Try posting and commenting to try and earn more or you can buy some Steem and power it up.
- Vote early, but not too early. The point of curation is to highlight good posts to get them up the hot/active rankings. If you are the first to vote on a post that subsequently earns a lot then you have a good chance to make something. BUT votes in the first 30 minutes lose some of their reward to the post author. If you vote in the first minute you will get 0%, but this rises to 100% over that half hour. This is to discourage bots, but those have probably worked out the optimal time to vote.
- Check the new feed for posts around 15-20 minutes old with few votes, but potential.
- Don't vote too often. Voting hundreds of times a day will do nothing for you. Your voting power goes down with each vote and then slowly re-fills. Around 20-40 times a day may be optimal. Those with a lot of Steem Power get a slider control so they can give a partial vote. I just got that when I passed 400SP
- Don't vote on a post with 100+ votes and expect to make anything. You can do it to show support, but you will probably make nothing. If that post already earned $100 then it must have a whale vote and they will take most of the reward. It may take 100 votes by people with 10SP to even make the post worth a cent, so you may be helping the author by voting. Edited this after comments from @solarguy (see his ). I don't want this to appear negative. Just trying to be realistic for those who expect to earn from voting.
- Vote on good comments. This can earn too, but people don't vote as much on comments, so don't expect too much.
There is more on the Steemit Documentation, but it may be out of date. That says 50% of the reward goes to curators, but I think it's only 25% now.
UPDATE: I've cracked 1 Steem Dollar over a week just from curation. That's with over 400SP. I'll keep on powering up so that improves.
Edited image from Wikipedia.