upVoting bots: Guide and Tips!

Hello everyone!

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Today I'm going to share my "upVoting bots" experience with you!

Here it goes:

I noticed that there are two big groups of bots:
1.- Bid-based Bots
2.- Content Promotion Bots

So, how do these bots work?

1.- Bid-based bots:

These Bid-based voting bots work on a bidding system. It splits a 100% upvote between all of the bids, based on their percentage, So, if someone bid 1SBD, and someone else bid 2 SBD, that 100% bot would be split 33.33% to the 1st, and 66.66% to the 2nd.

They vote every 2h25m more or less because the bot needs to recharge their voting power back to 100%. This is how long a bidding session takes. You can bid an amount of Steem/SBD above their minimum amount(Payment coin and min. amount varies from bot to bot).

These bots have a problem: You don't have a guaranteed profit. Here's why;

Exemple:
a certain bot's 100% vote gives $15.
Person A bids $4
Person B bids $9
Person C bids $7

In Return, these people received a vote worth:
A: $3 (20% of the total bid amount) Loss: $1
B: $6.75 (45% of the total bid amount) Loss: $2.25
C: $5.25 (35% of the total bid amount)Loss: $1.75

Those 3 were at a loss.

This happens quite often, and it happened to myself. And don't forget, on top of that, 35% of the vote goes to curation.

This is why I wouldn't recommend using these bots, as you may end with a loss;

Here are the ones I tried, one with a small profit, the other with a big loss:
https://steemit.com/@upmewhale

https://steemit.com/@nado.bot

2.- Content Promotion Bots

These bots work in a rather different way. You send an SBD/STEEM amount to the bot, just as with a bid-based bot, but the amount you sent isn't a bid. Most bots guarantee a profit, some 135% others 210%.
These actually gave me some very nice profit!

These are the bots I used:
https://steemit.com/@upvotewhale

On January 21st, 2018, this bot gives a 2.1x return vote. I sent 0.05 STEEM to the bot's account, and within 5 seconds i got a vote worth 0.105 SBD!

https://smartsteem.com
This bot, from what I understood, is a community bot: The votes you get are from different people who allowed the smartsteem bot to vote for them, and in return, they get 95% of what was paid for the vote. Its a rather interesting concept, one I like a lot!
After paying the bot 0.1 STEEM, I received more than 15 upvotes on my post. These votes, all summed up, gave me 0.16399 SBD! (Note, at this time, STEEM is valued at around 5USD while SBD is valued at around 8USD).

I'd recommend these bots to anyone, as they've worked flawlessly with me!

Honorable mention: The free bot!

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This was the first bot I found, and it is free!
https://steemit.com/@minnowsupport

All you have to do is join their discord and do a couple steps! You have 1 free vote every 24h!

Step 1: Join their discord at https://discord.gg/HYj4yvw

Step 2: Connect your discord with your steemit username by going to the registration channel and sending a message with "$register YourSteemitUsername"(without the quotes)

Step 3: send 0.001 STEEM or SBD to @msp-reg with your given memo!

After sending it, they will send you the same amount back and show this message on discord:

Step 4: Send a message in the upvote channel saying "$upvote LinkOfThePostYouWantToUpVote" (without the quotes), and the bot will upvote your post in seconds!

Awesome, right? Thanks to the MinnowSupportProject for making this happen! @minnowsupport

You can find lots of bots and their statistics here: https://steembottracker.com

I'm a fairly new steemian, and the community has been more than welcoming" So, I decided to share my experience in detail, in hope to help other fellow steemians!

Feel free to drop any questions down below, and upvote if this post helped you!

Thanks!