No worries on the separate replies, I appreciate you taking the time to answer. I read everything I could about Steemit when I got here a little over a month ago then realized if I tried to figure it all out I'd never get anything done. I jumped in and am still trying to decipher the best way to go about everything so I am definitely interested.

First thing. Don't convert to 100% SP. You are losing a ton of rewards this way.

Holy crap really?!?!?! I set it to 100% SP last week because I thought that would help me build my account faster so I could offer more with my upvotes. Literally just stopped writing this to go switch it back. I honestly thought that would be the best way to do it right now since I can't afford to throw money into it. At any rate, it's now changed back - thank you!

If you want to truly help them, then conserve your voting power and build your account so your votes are actually worth something.

I do, which is why I set it to full powerup.; I thought that would help me do that faster because my SP would be more. I'm finally to where I am giving .01 on my first 2-3 votes starting at 100% now. Which of course is still nothing, but it's something more than 0 (even though it is actually zero as I see you have already touched on in another post!)

To be honest, 90% of the votes on trail appear as .000 on my Ginabot notification. I love that I got 35 votes in 10 seconds, but the actual value isn't significant usually after the 1st 3 to 5 people in the trail.

I noticed this! I received a Curie vote on a post and it was really cool watching them all come in...then I looked at them.

Ok, I started this reply quite some time ago and am back to finish after reading a couple of your other posts. I guess my thinking was that if I held onto my votes at this point, they would still be zero anyway. I just checked and my Voting CSI is ( 0.00 % self, 45 upvotes, 29 accounts, last 7d ), so I think I'm ok since I'm not draining it regularly.

You've given me a lot to think about and I've already put some of it into action. Now, I'm switching tabs because you're open in another one and this is already a book. 😆

Seriously though - thank you!!