I first discovered the use of voting bots from a video posted by @brandonfrye. It was a bit overwhelming at first, especially when it came to the ROI, but I jumped in head first and just went ahead and tried it out. I'm a visual and hands-on learner, so I dove right in and learned by doing.
After reading through my tutorial, you should be confident in how voting bots work and how to best use them.
Why do people use voting bots?
The simplest answer is to give their post a boost. Essentially you are paying the bot in SBD or STEEM for a % of their vote, which boosts the value of your post increasing the amount of eyeballs that see your post. It's a win-win: the bot is earning for their vote and the bidder gets their post promoted and gets paid out from the bot vote.
Here's a very simplistic example to illustrate how this works. Let's say BotVoter1 has voting power of $40. After the voting round ends, John bids 1 SBD, Jack bids 2 SBD, Jill bids 0.5 SBD, and Jessica bids 0.5 SBD. Total bids: 4 SBD. The bot vote would be distributed as follows:
Now, let's take a look at how to bid on vote bots. To get started, go to: www.steembottracker.com
First thing to notice is that the "Display Currency" defaults to USD and the "Include 25% Curation" option is turned ON.
The list of bots are sorted by the amount of time remaining on the current round, with the soonest expiring bot vote rounds at the top of the list. The 3 columns boxed in red are the most important.
The Next Vote column is the amount of time left to bid on the current round before the bot vote is distributed.
Vote Value is the 100% vote value of the bot in USD.
Total Bids is the total bid value in USD.
If (Vote Value x 75%) > Total Bids, then your bid will result in Positive ROI
Click into the "Details" button (blue button) to see all the bidders for the "Current Round" as well as the "Last Round". Let's walk through how the ROI was calculated based on this example:
For the Current Round, the Total Bid Value currently is at $283.20 with the bot vote value at $504.60.
($504.60 x 75%) = $378.45 and since $378.45 > $283.20, you would earn positive ROI from using this voting bot.
ROI = ($378.45 - $283.20) / $283.20
ROI = $95.25 / $283.20 = 33.63%
Looking at the Last Round, the Total Bid Value was $384.35 with the bot value unchanged at $504.60.
($504.60 x 75%) = $378.45
ROI = ($378.45 - $384.35) / $384.35
ROI = -$5.90 / $384.35 = -1.54%
If I decided to bid on the Current Round of this bot round, keep in mind that by bidding, I would increase the total bid value which would decrease the ROI. The more bids that come in, the lower the ROI.
To track this, you would have to observe how much your post increases after the bot votes on your post. From my experiences, I usually make slightly over 100% on average. There are some cases where my return was less than 100%, but the majority of the time, I make back the SBD I spend and a little bit on top.
Here's a common scenario from my bot voting experiences. I'll spend 1 SBD bidding on a bot. After the bot vote, my post increases by $3.00. The payout from this is calculated as...
$3.00 * 75% = $2.25
The $2.25 will be paid out 50/50 in SP and SBD.
So by spending 1 SBD on the bot vote, I'll receive $1.125 worth of SP and 1.125 SBD. My profit would be 0.125 SBD and $1.125 worth of SP. Essentially, bot voting is a free post promotion plus you make some on top. Sounds like a no-brainer to me!
Some bots even feature the top bot voted posts to increase your post exposure even more if you get picked. To my surprise, I was actually featured in @buildawhale's Curation Digest yesterday:
https://steemit.com/curation/@buildawhale/buildawhale-curation-digest-01-24-18
I hope this helps clarify how bot voting works and why you should use it to promote your quality posts. Feel free to comment or ask any questions you may have.
