Well, hello there @prettydecent!

Several people have already given you some excellent advice, and the @sndbox guide is also a really valuable resource. I'll try to keep mine short, although I already hear one of the voices inside my head saying "Good luck with that..."

(1) Bidbots: This is purely opinion-- in 99% of cases, bidbots are the refuge of people whose content lack the quality to stand alone and speak for itself. That does not apply to you... your content isn't an out of focus photo of dryer lint with the words "please vote me, follow me, I need money."

On average, bidbots are a losing proposition. I have used a couple of them a couple of times-- with large amounts-- to launch PSA type posts into "trending" (one was a scam warning, the other a tutorial about something that was being misused), on a net-net basis, I lost about $10 on each of those efforts, but I bought visibility.

On the whole, here's what happens: You create a legit piece of good content, pay $5.00 what what seems to be about a $9.00 upvote (looks OK, right?), but then the rewards pool "settles" over 7 days and your $9.00 now reads $7.50 by payout time. But then the curators get 25% of your payout, and you actually end up with $5.62. Of which you actually just get HALF as liquid rewards, and the rest becomes Steem Power. Which can be OK, but if the price of Steem/SBD went down 10% that week (10% movements happen often) you're standing with a loss. Meanwhile, the upvote bot owner is $5.00 better off at no cost and no risk. Not exactly a win-win.

My account has been built 100% "organically." Were it not for the fact that we had some major unexpected life issues in early fall, I would still be fully powered up, which means the account would have about 11,000SP at this point... ALL as a result of simply posting and commenting/engaging. That's a LOT of ching for blogging, compared to what it would take in AdSense revenues.

(2) Yes, I track pretty much everything; Excel is my friend, and I just added columns for the daily price of Steem, BTC and my SP balance to my existing writing spreadsheets. Easy-peasy.

(3) As a one time thing, my intro post was picked up by one of the major curation guilds, and that made me a "believer" in this not being some kind of scam or fly-by-night shady venture. That did make a huge difference in my attitude... not everybody gets a rocket propelled start. Other than that, what makes a big difference is the Steemit Bloggers group on Discord... it's a good group that's centered around content creation. I dig that.