https://i.imgsafe.org/1b932b2435.jpg

After signing up to the premium version of Steem Voter I somewhat excitedly (and naively) added 500 people to my upvote list in the hope that it would instantly bring me fortunes - imagining that I was the first person to think of this!

Yeah, good one Sam! Clearly the platform developers have thought of this!  Within 24 hours my voting power went down to under 14%, making it useless not only to me but also to all the people I was voting for.

I had been receiving a pretty meagre return from my limited curation time as you can see below and was hoping to put an end to this with my new bot friend:

 https://i.imgsafe.org/1bc9415cf5.png

It turns out that it is important to watch your voting power perentage all the time and on Steemd you can do that and more.  

You can also view all your transactions in detail there (https://steemd.com).

A very useful site indeed if you want to keep a close track on what's going on with every vote you place and every curation reward that comes in to you.  You can even see what percentage of each reward ends up as Steem, Steem Power or Steem Dollars. 

https://i.imgsafe.org/1bc9f806d9.png

Having now read through all the very useful responses to my post yesterday I understand this situation much better now.

## Overvote and your power goes down!  

So that percentage bar must be used wisely.  

I had seen it there every time I made a vote but never thought once to adjust it from the default 100%.  

https://i.imgsafe.org/1c0d7a8b92.png

Thank you everyone for giving me your many tips as to what works best for you.

It has been interesting to see that there is in fact no 'correct' way to do this.  Only personal preference.

Ultimately this little discovery means that I must now sit down for another day and do more work on figuring out the correct percentage distribution of my votes, maintaining my power at somewhere between 60% - 80%.  That's the general feeling I get anyway from reading all your responses.

My voting power was down to under 14% yesterday when I was alerted to this and am happy to see that after 24hours of no voting it has gone back up to 30%.  

https://i.imgsafe.org/1bd4575dd9.png

Rising around 15% to 20% a day (as long as I don't do any voting!) I will be back to 100% in around three days, but in the meantime I must now put in the work, carefully evaluating each account I am following.  

## When is the best time to place my vote?

The default time on Steem Voter is 20mins which I had been adjusting to 15mins on each 'rule', just to be ahead of the default setting.  

However, I have since then learned that the best time to place one's vote is not as I had assumed.  Before I used the bot, I was upvoting people the moment their post came into my feed, sometimes less than one minute after them posting it.  

So, it turns out this is not the best time to upvote at all and can in fact mean that you get no curation rewards at all.  

@busser stated the situation very clearly for me: 'if you upvote in the first second as post appears - you'll have nothing - all curation will go to the author. In 15 minutes - you get 50% of curation. 30 minutes and after - all 100% are yours. But if you vote after whale, you will not have a penny also. So if you see popular post, sometimes it is better to vote at 15 minutes and get 50% then in 30 after whales.'

Yes, as I said... research needs to be done.  Much research.  Observe trends. Calculate average payouts, posts per day, steem power & reputation... and then figure out the voting percentage I want to give to each person.

Then I run tests. Watch my power percentage all the time and fine tune the machine till it purrs like a Rolls Royce.

That's the plan anyway!

Will keep you informed on how it turns out.

And thanks again to all of you for offering your many suggestions for me.  You are a very helpful bunch indeed :)

https://i.imgsafe.org/1be44ec963.jpg