Good writeup! I saw that you have been on here for some time so thanks for the introduction post. Have one upvote on the house and maybe upvote some of my stuff too!
As a newcomer to steemit, it's not easy getting those big upvotes so my advice would be to give @MinnowPowerUp a go as you can earn up to 30% more steem power than just powering up! It's a subscription based daily upvote bot that draws its power from a delegation pool. I have more info on my experience with the system in this post where I explain how I earn over $1 a day from upvotes.