Boost Posts on Steem with Upvote Bots!

in #steem7 years ago (edited)

How do we get more upvotes on a post on Steem?

Using the new Steem Upvote Bot Tracker by @yabapmatt we can see a list of upvoting bots running the Dr. Otto vote bidding bot by @inertia along with other custom post voting bots like @minnowbooster, which will give us upvotes in exchange for SBD.

Anyone with a witness server, seed node or other Ubuntu Linux can run a voting bot on a Steem account and accept bids in exchange for votes using https://github.com/inertia186/drotto.

Note I have tested bid based voting bots over the last month or two before making this post. Today I generally choose not to use any of them on my posts or make a system to profit off of paying for votes or running my own bot because I think a better investment is to buy more Steem and power it up to increase my own vote. Bid based voting bots are very useful for special cases to promote a post or counter downvotes on an occasional post. Sending SBD to a voting bot generally leads to a significant profit for both the bot operator and/or the Steem power delegation funding the bot.

If I ran a voting bot on my account, I would easily make about 100 SBD every day at the current price of Steem around $1. I choose not to run my own bot today even though it would be easy to setup on my seed node server because we have enough voting bots. I can do more good with my votes to help inspire hundreds of authors to keep adding value to our blockchain than I can making $100 a day for myself by running my own voting bot. Paying to use upvoting bots generally results in those with a lot of Steem power earning even more and everyone not using a voting bot to have a bit smaller upvote. The best way to promote posts is to simply buy Steem and power it up giving an indefinite vote increase.

That said, I still show this because it may be helpful for specific posts where a large amount of promotion is desired! Voting bots are also an amazing testimonial to the ability to innovate within the Steem blockchain economy which is good for all of us! To use the bots to upvote a post, follow the steps in this post or watch the tutorial video at the end of the post to get the votes on your post! The short version is to watch which votes, if any, are profitable, send the SBD to the right bot at the right time using a link to the post in the memo, and wait for the vote! This can be done for any user and sometimes for comments.

Steem Upvoting Bot Tracker Shows Profitable Promotion Potential


How do we give our posts a bit of a boost if we want to increase the amount of upvotes, but we've already maxed out our own voting power and we have some Steem Backed Dollars to promote them?

I will show you here how we can do that using Steem Upvote Bots on this tool by @yabapmatt. This tool by Matt, called Steem Upvote Bot Tracker, shows which one of the Steem upvoting bots is available, how much it's going to vote for and how much its next vote is worth.

I think that if you want to use an upvote bot this is extremely helpful to see which ones are profitable, to see which ones are worth using and at the same time to have a better alternative than "Promote" post.

The official option to promote a post on Steemit is to use this "Promote" button. If I dropped all of my 1,900 Steem Dollars in here I could promote this post and it would go up to the very top of the trending page.

It would take 1,900 of my Steem Dollars, essentially burn those as far as I understand and put it into the upvote, which I don't think I would then get paid for either, but it would just put that into the post.

This is the official option to promote and this will put it up both in the promoted content, and if it's high enough it will put it, as far as I know, onto the Trending page and Hot page as well.

This is a great way if you want to instantly promote your post and get it up to the top of the Hot page. You can just spend about 10 Steem Dollars and promote it and that will allow it to go right up there to the top. Now, the problem with this is it's essentially burned. As far as I understand you don't actually get that back since you used it to promote it. It just essentially gets burned and is gone.

Now, with these upvote bots what you're essentially doing is paying for an upvote from a bot that often has a lot of Voting Power.

For example, @booster has a $67 upvote right now, @buildawhale has a $90 upvote, and then @bellyrub has got a $46 upvote.

Now, that's at full power. What happens, these bots use the program, I believe, created by @inertia called something like "Dr. Otto" and you can run this on any account, even if you hardly have any Voting Power.

I could run this on my account if I wanted to, I've been considering it, but so far I've decided not to, and you can then accept upvotes from memos and Steem Backed Dollars sent in wallet transfers.

This is how these bots work: you send a memo with a minimum amount of Steem Backed Dollars and a link to your post, and then these bots put a corresponding amount of votes on your post based on how much you've sent.

What I will do is show you how I've used that and where I found this.

I found this on Utopian.io, which is a project by @elear. An incredible project created within the first month or so of @elear being on Steem.

I found this by browsing Utopian.io. I found Matt's update here, which has earned him between these two over $70 to create this upvote tracker, and it's located at http://steembottracker.com.

Steem Bot Tracker is then what I use to find all these different bots and to see which one is worth putting in a vote on.

This Steem Bot Tracker allows us to see which bots are worth using and to see which bots are available. These are bid-based bots I focused on so far, but there's also straight-up paid upvote bots.

For example, you can use @minnowbooster and some of these other bots have different rules that you can use to get upvotes.

You also have vote calculators, you can calculate how much they are worth.

I will show you how to use these and why you might consider using them. The first time I used any of these voting bots I had a couple of posts written by other authors where I wanted to get some extra votes. After I'd already done my full upvote, I wanted some more votes on it.

Here's why?

My friend Michel Gerard wrote a nice post about why he's voting for me as a witness. I gave him a hundred percent upvote on it worth $7. He got a few more upvotes, which gave him about $10. @nextgencrypto then came along after I resteemed this and down-voted it $11 hiding the entire post and taking all the rewards away.

I looked at that and said, “Well, I don't agree with that. I will take some of my Steem Backed Dollars to promote this."

What I did then, I sent each of these voting bots about 11 Steem Backed Dollars. I sent @bellyrub 11 Steem Dollars, I sent @buildawhale 11 Steem Dollars and I sent about $10 or so to @minnowbooster.

Now, these bots collectively added $42 or so in upvotes to the post. While the post was hidden before and I'd already upvoted it, so it couldn't be uploaded anymore, I spent about $30 and these bots added about $40 in upvotes to the post, and the post has earned $46 in rewards.

Now, the author gets $35, so @gmichelbkk will get $35. The curators will get $11 on this post.

I will get a lot of the curation rewards because I made one of the first votes on it for a large amount and so I will get maybe a few dollars back from the curation rewards. I use this upvoting bot because I couldn't use any more of my own voting power and I felt it should be upvoted more.

These upvoting bots can be used in similar situations.

For example, I have a new post here.

Now, I'm grateful it's earning $100. It doesn't need to earn more than $100, that's enough. However, if I wanted to push it further up on the trending page, then I could just grab the URL on this post and go into my wallet, and then go over into "Transfer."

Then let's say I wanted to use @booster, I would type "booster" in without the @ and put in my bid.

According to the voting bot track, I wouldn't want to actually use @booster, right this moment because it has $95 in bids on a $67 upvote, which means that it's not likely to even pay back what the users have voted for. After the next set of upvotes, that might change in a few hours and it might be profitable.

Now, that's why you want to use something like this Steem Upvote Bot Tracker. You can see which one of these is available and @bellyrub might be a better bet right now because it has $17 on upvotes available.

I would use @bellyrub right now because not as many people are on it, and then for $11 what I would do, I would put in the URL of the post in the Memo here.

This is all I need to do to use one of these upvoting bots: I go to my wallet, I do a transfer, I put in the name of the upvoting bot and I put in a bid that corresponds with the Max Profitable Bid on here.

I don't want to go do a bid that's less than the profitable bid.

For example, if the max profitable bid is zero, I'm essentially losing money. If I send $11 dollars to @booster right now, just because it's got a bunch of bids as it's so popular, I will probably only get a $5 or $6, maybe $7, upvote.

You use this Max Profitable Bid column to pick out one of these bots. Now, keep in mind that some of them have different amounts of time until they're going to vote.

For example, @buildawhale is going to vote in 33 minutes, so if it's that profitable of a vote, I might be able to send $20 and get a vote for $45.

Maybe I will use that, but now that I've shown you this tracker that will probably ruin the ability to just sneak in for a lot of us and get a profitable upvote because any of us can look at this, and then do this.

If I wanted to send to @bellyrub, I got the post in, and I submit here.

Then, as you can see in the transfers, each individual one of these transactions has its own follow-up.

I sent 11 Steem Dollars to @booster for that same post and it said, "Unable to accept bid." I sent something to @minnowhelper and it didn't accept, @randowhale did not accept it either.

However, these 11 Steem Dollars I sent to @booster, @buildawhale and @bellyrub, all of these went through as you can see on my friend Michel Gerard's post here.

That's how you use these Steem Bot Trackers, I've seen a lot of questions like, "How do I get my post promoted a bit more?"

The best time to use these bots depends on when you're hoping to get a return out of it in terms of, for your curators or for yourself. If you want to boost this up and help your post to reach the Trending page, you want to hit your post as soon as possible.

If I wanted to do this on one of my newest posts, the ideal scenario for my curators, I would set it up to go off about one hour after my post went up.

That way all of the curators automatically voting on my posts would get good rewards that were enhanced by the bots, and then my post would have the best chance to go into the Hot and the Trending page.

Now, there's not a ton of people, that are checking the Hot page and the Trending page all the time, but there are additional followers and votes you can get from being up there. If I want to make a new post today, and then push it up with the upvoting bots, I could do that and the first 24 hours essentially is the best time to do that.

If @buildawhale and @bellyrub both continue to have a good profit margin here, by the time they go to in about five minutes, I may just throw in my $10 because I'll get more than that back on an upvote, and that will boost the rewards for all my curators as well.

One key way to get a lot of upvotes is to provide good rewards for curators. That means for the people who upvote you automatically early especially, if you pay out good consistently, if your posts get more votes after the first hour, you've got a good shot at having people set you on an auto-voter because after that first hour it is mostly manual votes. If your post do a good job getting manual votes that's attractive for the automatic bot voting if that makes sense.

Now, one downside to consider is that you're essentially paying for Voting Power using these, which means you are lining the pockets essentially of whoever runs these voting bots.

Who we choose to give our money to on these bots makes a difference as to who's making a profit. These bots are very profitable and it's worth learning exactly who's responsible for the bot as well. Even if the bot is paying good money on an upvote, you may want to consider, “Who am I helping? Who am I essentially giving this money to?”

It's not obvious on the bots themselves right away to see exactly who is profiting from these bot upvotes. That's something to consider and I realize that on principle a lot of us may just say that you shouldn't even allow voting bots like this because it kind of ruins the curation in some ways.

I had1,900 Steem Dollars in my account when I made this and I could essentially just use these upvoting bots all the time to give my curators bigger rewards, to draw even more auto-upvotes on my posts.

Using these voting bots produces a lot of profit for the people running the voting bots and it then potentially reduces the ability or the effectiveness of other users being able to just get normal votes or to compete with someone who's essentially paying for upvoting bots.

There's some downsides to these bots as well and I encourage you to take a look at this in terms of whether you want to use them or not, and to understand that sometimes these may not work properly. You may send money in, it might take hours to get a refund if the bot's vote doesn't go off for some reason.

They can be very helpful though for getting some new views on your posts, especially if you're struggling to get over that ten or twenty dollar mark on a post, and you just want some additional traffic from the Trending or the Hot page.

Using these voting bots can help, but at the same time if there are too many people using the bots, if the Max Profitable Bid is zero, then essentially it is losing money to send over to that bot. If you see the voting bot is in the profitable area, you might be able to get a good vote on that.

I appreciate you reading this.

I hope this has been helpful for you.

I love you.

You are awesome.

Final words


Thank you very much to Matt or @yabapmatt for making this tool for us to track these bots.

Thank you to the managers of the bots who've given us this option, whether or not we should or should not use it, but this is at least here, it is possible for us to use.

I hope you have a wonderful day today.

Thank you for reading this blog post, which was originally filmed as the video below.

If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?

Love,

Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj

Shared on:

Would you please make a vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because the rewards I receive go to pay for ads which will help promote Steem for years? Thank you to the 1900+ Steem accounts voting for me as a witness, the nearly 1 million dollars worth of Steem power assigned by followers trusting me to make all witness votes through setting me as proxy, and @followbtcnews for making these .gif images!

Vote Jerry Banfield Steem Witness

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Upvote Services were created due to the gap in the market, especially for minnows to effectively promote their posts. In that sense, it does help smaller authors get their content out there, and is currently the only and most effective means of doing so.

However, I am a firm believer that Upvote Services are a net Negative on the Steemit ecosystem from a number of reasons.

I have written 2 in-depth articles on the matter, one on the identifying of issues of Upvote Services and how they are negatively affecting the Steemit ecosystem and the other, as a Utopian.io proposal for the proposed solution which includes a link to your proposal for funding projects.

You can find them here :

Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit
Proposal for New 'Promoted' Function

I sincerely believe my proposed solution would bring a positive impact to the entirety of the Steem ecosystem as well as solve the current issue with Upvote Services cause a rift in Steemit itself.

It is upending the sorting algorithm, taking funds out of the rewards pool necessarily and creating an uneven playing field especially for minnows.

I am doing my best to bring awareness onto the proposal and if anyone has the time to take a look at it, it would really mean a lot. If you do agree with my proposal and would like to see it come to fruition, a resteem would absolutely be appreciated.

I'm with you @bitopia , I'm still relatively new to Steemit and Cryptocurrency in general but I've learned so much simply by joining this community. I've definetly noticed the use of bots to give a few post a competitive edge and as a tech person myself I figure maybe I should look into but, but one of the reason I love Steemit is its crypto-reddit style honest blockchain community and even as a rookie I feel like using bots to control upvote power is completely unfair to creators who are trying to come on the rise like myself. I makes me feel like whats the point in spending to much time on a post when someone is cheating eh system to rise up. This will definitely destroy the ecosystem. I read through your "Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit" voted and resteemed.

Edit** Removed the "Screw this bot crap. Just no." Felt it sounded a bit rude and again maybe I'm missing the positives about this if there are any. Anyone care to break it down?

I'm with you @bitopia , I'm still relatively new to Steemit and Cryptocurrency in general but I've learned so much simply by joining this community. I've definetly noticed the use of bots to give a few post a competitive edge and as a tech person myself I figure maybe I should look into but, but one of the reason I love Steemit is its crypto-reddit style honest blockchain community and even as a rookie I feel like using bots to control upvote power is completely unfair to creators who are trying to come on the rise like myself. I makes me feel like whats the point in spending to much time on a post when someone is cheating eh system to rise up.

Your negative sentiments towards the Steemit experience thus far is exactly what I am aiming to counteract. If the system stays as it is, newer users like yourself will soon enough find themselves to frustrated and leave when they could be contributing good work and earning good money accordingly.

This will definitely destroy the ecosystem. I read through your "Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit" voted and resteemed.

Thank you very much! You may also want to read my full proposal which I posted alongside that post as that is where I describe my solution to the problem.

Edit** Removed the "Screw this bot crap. Just no." Felt it sounded a bit rude and again maybe I'm missing the positives about this if there are any. Anyone care to break it down?

The positive of Upvote Services, is that it filled a need in the market for authors to have their work seen more often. So that's what the whales did, they filled the gap in the market. Obviously, having to play within the confines of Steemit's capabalities, and that's what they came up with. It is simply a unintended side-effect that it is causing a negative impact right now which needs to be rectified.

I agree with you, in my opinion bots damage the ecosystem. I dont feel angry when someone uses them, but I do feel that steem would be a better place without them!

Absolutely, Steemit would be better off without them, and that is why I am putting in my best effort to rally more support around my proposal in hopes that it may actually be implemented.

I went to your blog and read your proposal about the promoted function, I'm definitely going to support that! It can be the solution for the voting bot's crisis.

Thank you for taking the time! I definitely believe it has the means to do so. However, based on how much traction it has gotten so far, it is far from being taken seriously.

I will be working upon a proposal 1.1 where I refine some points and add a few new things. I don't know what it will take to have it implemented but everyday that I see that it isn't it just makes me uncomfortable.

This post has received a 9.36 % upvote from @boomerang thanks to: @bitopia

@boomerang distributes 100% of the SBD and up to 80% of the Curation Rewards to STEEM POWER Delegators. If you want to bid for votes or want to delegate SP please read the @boomerang whitepaper.

That's a great comments I appreciate it 👍

@jerrybanfield - don't forget that @booster has a huge @frontrunner guild that vote before booster. Adding more value to the author and curators then what is advertised.

@fyrstikken the images jerry used are a little bit outdated it seems. Recently I've added an indicator for any bots that have front runner / pre-vote guilds to further promote those on the site. If you click on that it will take you to the @frontrunner profile page to learn more.

I don't believe we've ever spoken before but I wanted to thank you for creating / running booster. Now there are many large vote bots but when i started just a few months ago booster was the main one and it really helped me promote my early posts and start growing my following.

Also I believe you personally upvoted some of my posts so thank you for that as well!

It has been a pleasure. You can find me on http://SteemSpeak.com Discord if you want to speak, I'm active there 17 hours a day since like... forever :)

Always great information, Jerry! Thank you for this. Upvoted @ 100% for you!

Can i install a Upvote bot on my notebook windows 10?

man i love your posts , all my friends love you and the way you explain
i use mac os siera :)) and the option that reads for you speech after you select the text :D i'm to laizy and you write a book every time :) sounds like that man from anonymus i feel good :)

jerrybanfield upvoted me :D i'm like 11267027_10153463280054736_330950439_n.gif

if you recognize both positive and negative potentials for using bots, do you see this as a temporary fad, or do you see that the pros outweigh the cons of using bots?

@motoengineer I think bots are here to stay and the pros/cons about balance out.

I believe this is just like paying for promoted posts here on steemit as non of these bots hardly ever give you a profit but instead actually cost you some steem compared to the rewards you get. This is why I feel it is an even playing field. I just wish I had my own that people paid me for! (If anyone knows how and is interested in being hired for it hit me up please)

@jerrybanfield You are what STEEMIT is all about helping everyone benefit from the platform. Thank You for showing us another feature. I am like you and I say just keep Powering UP !!!

Hi ,
Thanks for the great content

great post but bot are very high price some need 1 sbd and some need 2 sbd so for Beginningers is very high cost;)

@steemvote is charging 0.05 for reesteming a target of about 2,500+ followers. Additionally you get about 25 upvotes which almost reach brake even. Good for marketing and creating an audience which in turn eventually will create you more upvotes.

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