Getting on the trending page as a newbie is a huge risk. There is a learning curve on Steem that everyone should experience. A few months ago a guy bought his way to the top of ‘trending’ and was smashed with $500+ worth of downvotes because he did not provide sources to a post he copied from his own Medium account. Even though almost all downvotes were removed, the negative attention and stress of possibly losing all that money hardly seems worth it. If he had been on Steem a lot longer, he would have learnt what and what not to do. He stopped using bots and his posts are now getting about 0.2 Steem. I think he would rather make almost nothing than potentially lose hundreds of dollars.
Another big problem with bid-bot 'promotion' is that the community is indirectly paying for someone else's promotion. As more people use bid-bots, more SP will be delegated to bots (returns from vote selling is good, if people are buying them). If newbies follow your advice, it is going to make it more difficult for anyone to get high value organic upvotes.
Better advice would be to promote your content on other social media platforms. I promote my content on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Minds, and LinkedIn. I also offer post beneficiary rewards to my top upvoters and post commenters to reward them for their contributions to my posts.
That's crazy, $500 worth of downvotes. It's good that there are ppl trying to police the platform but some have a lot of power in censoring content.
In this particular example, a huge downvote came from spaminator. A few bots also removed their upvotes as well. Getting on the trending page through bot upvotes can be very financially risky if your content looks like spam or 'might be' plagiarised.
Steem needs a real promotion system. Promotion through bot upvotes is just a spill over effect from buying votes. If Steemit changed its trending algorithm, User Authority for example. Buying votes would be purely for gains from ROI, which for most content is currently the case anyway. Just this time, bot owners won't be able to claim vote selling is for promotion.
You make a great point about education and the learning curve. This is why I have an online class teaching people about the workings of Steemit. It is very difficult when you’re new.
The information in your shitty online course is freely available, and of better quality, on Steemit already. You should be directing people to the freely available information instead of directing them to your poorly informed udemy course.
Edit: Flagged to remove the visibility of your shitty course promotion.