This is an introduction article for non technical users who want to get involved, who want to know how to use the voting option consciously and what benefit could you get out of it. 

What you want to learn fast to advance on the Steem network.

If you are new on Steemit and you are excited about the community and of course your earning opportunities, you might want nothing more, but to have a rapid learning curve. The first thing you are recommended to do, is to follow people. Discover interesting content in your field of interest and follow the authors of your choice. 

Being within the first 2 weeks of your Steem experience, a good number of people to follow will be between 50 and 100. As soon as they publish a blog post, it appears in your "Feed´s" page. 

To interact with people on the Steem network, you can comment on their blog posts and you can vote for their content. 

                                                       

Today, let´s have a look on how voting works!

First Rule

It´s all about quality! You could call it a PPQ - Pay Per Quality program.

Curation Rewards and the posts you are voting on

If you think a blog post is useful, upvote it. Either in the listings, or better, go on the article, reading it through, making sure it is high quality and then clicking the upvote arrow next to the $ amount of the payout. If you think it is abusive, go on the top right and click the flag. Your votes are public information. They are permanently recorded on the Steem blockchain. But don´t worry, if you upvote someone, you are not spending your own money.

 When curating, upvoting and flagging, you are actually getting paid by the Steem system with newly minted crypto currency, to decide who should be paid. Curation Rewards are paid solely in Steem Power. To get the maximum back on your vote, vote exactly on 20 posts per 24 hours. Because each vote leverages up to 5% of your Steem Power. Anything more than that and the power of your votes and your earnings decline exponentially. Note, that your vote´s power declines after each vote. So don´t cast a lot of votes all at once. 

You can check your current voting power at https://steemd.com /@yourusername . 

In the left hand column look for Steem Power. The closer the number is to 100%, the greater the power remaining in your next vote. 

Upvotes on content that has reached it´s first payout, which is approximately 24 h after publication, sometimes longer, still pay the author but pay you zero Curation Rewards. 

I cannot overestimate the importance of good productive behavior on the Steem network. It is still small. Powerful, high Steem Power users, which are known as whales and dolphins are paying attention. You will not gain their support, if you engage in non constructive behavior.

You can maximize your Curation Rewards by voting on posts you think others will also vote for, before they actually vote for them. Voting early and not voting on content that is already on top of the charts will increase your Steem Power.

Note, that within the first 30 minutes that a blog post is published, your Curation Rewards are shared with the author. Upvoting immediately after publication and 99.94% of your Curation Reward goes to the blog post author, not you. This percentage declines with time. At 15 minutes after publication and you get 50%, at 30 minutes you get a 100%.

Curation rewards are assigned using a reverse auction thou. So, the earlier you vote, the higher the reward you get. You need a strategy in order to get regularly profit from curation. 

Good luck and let´s keep on learning.

If you found this article interesting and useful, I do appreciate your resteem or

 

Cheers,

Daniel