How many ways are there to POWER-UP on Steem, on STEEMIT.COM and other Steem platforms? You can go into your wallet and wire your Steem to your Steem Power (SP), and SP is like a bond, a trust fund, that has been collecting interest. And SP gives you more upvoting power which is not to be confused with reputation points. New users start with a reputation of 25 and mine is 52 right now. A bigger number is better.
You can also power up simply by writing posts, comments, that is as people upvote (like) your posts, your comments, what you write on Steem: when people upvote (curate) your posts, some of that will maybe go into your SP and that is how I power up, slowly. When people upvote me, I get SP sometimes.... and/but I also get some Steem Backed Dollars (SBD or SD) too and I sometimes transfer that or wire that or sell that or trade that out to my Bitcoin wallet or something.