Vote selling is a controversial topic. You may have come across people who do not approve the practice of selling votes. At the same time, there are people who actively sell their votes. I will share the reasons to sell your votes in this post so that you can decide whether to do it or not. This post will help you learn how to sell your vote on Steemit through automation-based vote selling services which do not require you to upvote manually.
Image designed via Canva.com and background image is free to use from the inbuilt gallery. MinnowBooster and SmartSteem images are used with permission.
The two popular vote selling services that exist on Steemit are MinnowBooster and SmartSteem. I have covered these services in detail already. However, these two guides contain extensive deliberation on each of the various features offered by them; resulting in more than 7000 words of content. I wanted to cover vote selling exclusively for my readers so that they can get focused knowledge about vote selling and how it works.
Why Sell Vote?
Steemit is based on Steem which is a cryptocurrency. If you have bought some Steem and powered up, it is your investment. Even if all your SP was generated from authorship and curation on Steemit, it is a reward for your investment in terms of your time and effort. Whatever SP you have in your wallet is your stake in the Steem blockchain. The way you use your stake/investment is up to you. There may be some use cases which are considered objectionable by the community. There are others which may benefit Steemit and its users, including you.
Selling your vote is one of the use cases of your stake in the platform.
Here are some of the reasons to justify vote selling.
- The very fact that vote selling services exist without much resistance from the community is enough of a justification to sell your vote, if you wish to.
- Another strong reason for selling votes is that earning dividends from your investment is your privilege.
- Willingness of users to buy votes from vote selling services shows an increasing demand for content promotion, which you can help fulfill through your vote.|
- Sometimes, you may not be active on the platform and your SP may not be earning you anything. It would be more appropriate to enable automatic vote selling so that you can earn SBD/Steem from the service as well as the curation reward for your vote.
- You may have bought Steem as a crypto investment for long term hold and may be using Steemit just as a wallet. Instead of keeping this Steem in wallet, you may choose to power up and then sell vote to earn dividends.
- It is better than excessive self voting. Instead of voting on your comments and posts, especially if you do it too often, you can sell your vote to whoever is willing to buy it.
There may be many reasons to sell vote. Economic reasons would always prevail though. As a content creator, you want to use vote selling carefully. Just as you need votes from others to earn rewards, others need your vote as well. If you commit all of your voting power to vote selling, it is a bit unfair in my opinion. The decision to sell or not rests with you. I am interested in sharing how to sell your vote and earn some profit.
How to Sell Your Vote?
Currently, @minnowbooster and @smartmarket (content promotion service by @smartsteem) are the two popular content promotion services. MinnowBooster was the first one to enable vote selling and it remains a widely used service. SmartSteem has emerged as a smart alternative. Both offer lucrative vote selling service. Let's look at them separately.
1. Sell Vote Through MinnowBooster
For using all the services offered by MB, you need to become a member of MinnowBooster website by logging in with your Steemit credentials. Here's how to do that.
- Go to https://www.minnowbooster.net (MinnowBooster website).
- Click My Account on top right and then click Login.
- The click will take you to SteemConnect page as shown below. Click CONTINUE to verify your Steemit account.
- The click will further take you to the sign in page where you need to enter your username and password. Use only Posting Key because selling votes is possible with posting key.
- You will be logged in to the website. Now you are a member.
After becoming a member, you can use all the services offered by MinnowBooster. Selling your vote is a very simple process. It is explained below.
- Click My Account and then Edit Info as shown below.
- You need to enable vote selling to @minnowbooster by sliding the button to green. Then you should authorize the bot to vote on your behalf. Then you can adjust the minimum Voting Power below which the bot should not vote on your behalf. Finally, do not forget to update your information. Too much to digest? See the screenshot below.
- After enabling vote selling, you also need to authorize MinnowBooster to use your account to vote by clicking where asked. Clicking will take you to the authorization page. Click continue and enter your posting key to enable vote selling. Use active key only if you wish to use other services too.
- Do not forget to click the UPDATE button to save your settings.
Here is some of the information that will help you use this service efficiently.
- By selling your vote, you earn 85 % of all the SBD against which your vote was used.
- Since MB is taking 0.01 SBD as minimum bid on posts, you need to be able to give a vote at least worth $0.03 to have a chance. At current Steem price, at least 115 SP is required. Drop in price will increase the minimum SP requirement and vice versa.
- A full vote will cost you 2 % VP. VP is the only cost you pay when your account is used for voting. Set minimum SP such that you can upvote posts from the authors you follow and the comments on your posts too. Dedicating all you VP to MinnowBooster is greedy unless you are unable to be active for some weeks or months.
- You can view the history of your vote selling and even the posts on which your vote was used. Randomly visit these posts to check them for quality and if you see an abuse, report in the MinnowBooster discord channel. I did that once and @reggaemuffin immediately unvoted the post and banned the user.
- You can always see your earned SBD balance on the site and withdraw it to your Steemit wallet.
- MinnowBooster launched Spam Detector last week as announced by @furious-one, which is an amazing step to fight spam. It strengthens the reasons to sell votes knowing that efforts to fight spam are fully on.
I recently set my least VP to 92 % so that I can upvote Steemians mostly and sell votes only when I am inactive, sleeping or at the office. Just today, MinnowBooster asked for Steemians' help in helping minnows by selling votes. I am thankful to @techblogger for including the link to my MinnowBooster tutorial. You can read the post by clicking the link.
2. Sell Vote Through SmartSteem
To use SmartSteem to sell your votes, you will have to sign up with their website. Go to SmartSteem.com and click login. Please note that the link contains my referral link. If you sign up using my referral link, you lose nothing and I gain a small percentage of SmartSteem's profits (not yours). I always value transparency so I disclosed the information right away.
An interesting aspect of SmartSteem is manual whitelisting. Whitelisting is done to evaluate content produced by applicants. After the review, users are given any of the three SmartScore ratings.
- Excellent: If your content is rated excellent, you get three stars.
- Good: If your content is of good quality, you get two stars. This is where I am right now.
- Average: If your content is just okay, you get one star.
Selling votes on via SmartSteem service becomes a great activity considering it allows us to vote for only the content that is worth voting. To enable vote selling, click Features under your profile. It will take you to vote selling settings page.
- Enable vote selling.
- Configure when you wish to be paid out. Whatever you earn in this period will be sent to your wallet.
- Set the least VP below which the service won't be able to use your vote. Keep the limit higher than 80 % to always have good VP at your disposal. I need to change the settings.
- Choose the content quality on which you wish your vote to be used. I choose good quality. If you choose anyone, you cannot ensure if the content you voted on if of the required quality. I recommend voting only to whitelisted users (at least average quality) to prevent abuse.
Here's what the form looks like.
But to enable SmartSteem to use your vote, you need to authorize it first. You can do it on the above form. Mine is already authorized.
That's it. Your vote will now be sold whenever the conditions you set are satisfied. You will earn 85 % of whatever the amount of SBD your vote was used against.
Here are some reasons you may be interested in selling votes through SmartSteem.
- Selling votes on a market, which gives you 85 % of whatever your vote earns, is better than self-voting comments and posts excessively to earn rewards; which is not a good practice.
- You can choose the quality of content your votes are used on. This is like upvoting good quality but with the added advantage of earning a fair amount of SBD.
- By voting good content through the service, you also earn curation rewards.
I changed minimumVP to 89 % on SmartSteem to ensure that my votes are sold only when I am inactive, sleeping or at the office. My voting priorities are explained here. You need to have enough SP (always based on Steem's current price) to be able to sell your vote. You can increase your SP by earning author and curation rewards. Alternatively, you can buy Steem and power up or use it to lease some SP (see MinnowBooster guide for that).
Conclusion
Automated vote selling is possible through SmartSteem (by @therealwolf) and MinnowBooster (by @cryptomancer, @thecryptodrive, and @reggaemuffin). The option to sell votes presents an investment opportunity for you. These two services are aimed at helping minnows, so you can aid them in their mission and earn some sweet profit.
If you have any question, do share it in the comments. It would be kind of you to support this post through your valuable upvotes and resteems. Helping this post with upvotes will not only benefit the community at large, but also will encourage me to put more effort into educating Steemians to create a better ecosystem on Steemit.
I'm already using minnow booster but I'll definitely power up and try smart steem as well.
I am sure that vote selling is more profitable than vote buying which I just stopped. Actually I just stopped both selling and buying votes, I believe that in this way I won't support anymore this system which empowers only the whales and not minnows who do not benefit of curation and lose visibility.
Anyway, the tutorials are great for the people who want to try vote selling.
hey @mejustandrew,
vote-buying is actually a system which supports minnows - by giving them the chance to gain visibility.
When I started and vote-buying wasn't as popular as it is now - it was a complete ****-fest to gain any viewers. Even if the content was good. Because it doesn't matter if no-one is seeing the post because in the same minute - 100 other posts are created.
I agree with you @therealwolf. I am a minnow and I bought votes from smartsteem. Still waiting to get whitelisted though. But even without the whitelist, it is still the most profitable upvote service I bought. I like it for the following reasons:
Very few (perhaps none) of the other paid bid bots can match all 4 reasons. All these 4 reasons are verified by me exactly 20 times so far. Perfect every single times.
It votes from multiple accounts, making the votes look organic. These accounts are users like you and I.
Yes, I know. I have been using them for a couple of weeks. No complains so far
Yes, I have experienced this in my short time on here too. I'm so glad that the first people I followed bought upvotes so that I could know to do it from the start. I think I've gotten good post visibility on here in a short while and a big part of that is that I knew from the beginning that I needed to invest in advertising, which is what the bots are.
Hey @indigoocean, I've seen you too many times in a matter of days and for all the good reasons. Following you, speedster. Keep doing great work here.
😀😜
I understand your sentiment. I did a detailed review of my voting habits last week and made a clear plan. It's linked in this post as well. I designed my voting pattern such that the maximum votes go to Steemians mamually or through an autovoting service. Selling happens only when I am inactive or sleeping (if the VP recovers to a certain point).
It is profitable from an investment point of view. Buying votes hasn't been profitable for me either but it has enabled some good promotion in past.
I have been trying to figure out this voting through minnow booster with not much success. Your post gave me what I was missing and now I have it set up. Next up will be SmartSteem.com . Thank you for your post.
I will resteem because I think some of my followers can benefit as well.
you are great heart @r2cornell
Please @2cornell check my profile once
@taylor10 please go to your blog and look at what I wrote in your post "ME"...I also sent you a message through your wallet.
This is an excellent article (as always)...!
I have a question that I am not sure who to ask..
If I wish to delegate some SP (not much yet, but...) to curator(s) that I trust, what will this mean for me? (other than loosing from my own curation rewards)
Have you created a guide somewhere that I could not find?
Thank you in advance for reading my comment & keep up the
phenomenal work!
I have not created a guide on this topic yet. I may create it soon. Delegating will mean the following.
You will lose some of the influence on the platform you had before delegation.
Your influence will be delegated to the person you chose. His or her vote value will increase due to added SP.
Your effective SP will be reduced but you will not lose the ownership of your SP.
You can undelgate any time.
But it will take 7 days after undelegation to get your SP back in your wallet.
I hope it suffices. Questions are welcome (as always). Thank you for the comment.
Thank you for your reply @ilyastarar :)
It is very clear and I appreciate it.
I want to ask something else. Let's suppose that I delegate amount of my SP to you. (for the sake of a simplified example :))
I am not entitled to any thing, right? Except if you wish to share with me, an amount of your curation rewards. But it is not automated and certainly not obligatory, correct?
So, what I am asking in the end is:
If someone wishes to delegate their hard earned steem power, in order to make an (even small) profit, can it only be done by selling votes (through services such as the ones you mention)?
Thank you again and I am getting ready to create a medium account to follow you there too!
Absolutely correct!
Vote selling does not need a delegation. It works by giving posting authority to the vote buying service (MB and SS). Profitable delegations cases can be when:-
You delegate to a bid bot (you receive a share of their profit).
You fill an SP lease request on MinnowBooster (you get 90 % of the Steem paid by the person to receive SP delegation).
You delegate to anyone, me for example, and receive an upfront or regular payment for it, as decided and agreed.
I hope your question is answered.
Yes, thank you! Everything is more clear now :)
I wish you a wonderful and constructive day,
Katerina
Thank you, Katerina!
You have managed to change my view slightly about vote sales. For known to be inactive accounts selling to known supporters of the platform like MinnowBooster makes sense.
Thanks for the in depth look into the subject, @ilyastarar!
I am glad I helped you make that slight change. Thanks for the feedback!
I think i'd actually consider it, as i've little or shallow knowledge on the subject, i found this very educative though, and i hope i am doing the right thing for the first time really.
Thank you @ilyastarer for the expository teaching on vote selling
Thank you for reading and leaving a comment.
Well, of course, I didn't read it in 2 minutes and I already know about it.
But I must say - the guide is so esthetic and looks like you covered everything.
Amazing as always!
Thank you so much for your feedback!
Hi ilyastarar, I love to read all your post.i have one question might you not cover yet. I am a newbies steemit. Previously I'm upvote I'm still able to see my value vote.but now it seem that my value is thrash.it just an indications I have voted.but zero value. I hope I'm able to find answer from you.
There are three factors which can change vote value.
The amount of SP in your wallet, including delegated one.
Your voting power (one full vote consumes 2 % VP which regenerates in 2.4 hours).
Price of Steem (which has a direct relationship with vote value).
I think price of Steem and your VP are the main reasons for low vote value. See your vote value on steemnow.com/@username
thanks friends for the advice, but it seems I still can not to sell my vote because my SP is very little for now. but in the future if I have a decent SP to sell the vote I will try it out a friend. thank you for posting a friend.
MB requires more SP than SS. You can try selling via SS for now and see if it makes sense.
thanks for the advice of friends, I will try later. hopefully success is always with us friends.
I'm already using minnow booster but I'll definitely power up and try smart steem as well.
@ilyastarar i am starting from you the punjabi song . this really help me to understand. I am beginner what you suggest what i do. Don,t have steem power. Thanks for the tutorial waiting for the next post.
I am interested. But smartsteem also needs my active or owner key for authorization? Is it necessary to authorize it using active key because only for upvoting posting key should be enough?
thanks for the tutorial
its a win-win condition :D
No doubt this ia an awesome post but i have a question
No minimum bar set so far.
great post very informative post thnks for sharing.
thankyou @ilyastarar
upvote and follow @rikineng
You have resteemed my post so I thank you for it. This comment is worth a flag though. Please amend it to make some kind of sense.
wonderfull your post dear @ilyastarar..
Another great, comprehensive post and a very interesting subject matter. My SP is low as I am rather new to the platform, but I have a portion of it delegated to a bot in order to earn a little extra on the side. It's not a great deal, but everything helps at the moment.
I understood all you wrote perfectly. But I'm still not clear in some areas.
You mentioned a steemian need to have an SP worth $0.03 before selling votes. Right?
I'm still working on achieving a $0.01 upvote. I've always believed i will start earning from curations once that is achieved. Does it mean it isn't enough?
Great tutorial as always! But I do have a question, since I never attempted vote selling, nor do I think I will. Delegating or auto-voting when I'm not using the platform, might be great ideas your previous post gave me.
By vote selling, it means your account will vote for certain posts automatically, without you being involved in the process of selecting who you vote for or not, right?
If I understood the process correctly, doesn't this mean that it implicitly seems like you support the ideas in those posts (or maybe low quality content)?
If I didn't understand the process correctly, please be so kind to explain it to me.
One day this is something I can do with a small % of my upvotes. I like how you keep yours set at 89% VP. I think that's a good idea. But right now my SP is too low for it to be profitable for me at all. Good to have plans for the future though.
Anything that you may manage to earn from your spare VP is a profit :)
I leased an SP and I'm looking for some way to maximize it before it expires and I think this is one of the best ways to do. I just enable my sell votes in smartsteem but I'm wondering with the vote value they will cast on each vote. Would it always be 100%? or their system will decide? Thank you :)
I think it is not compulsory that 100 % value will be used. But is probable that full votes may be used often. @therealwolf, please clarify.
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 1 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 152 SBD worth and should receive 321 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigSelling votes is what is wrong with steemit now. And this guide doesn't take a lot of factors into consideration.
Please highlight those factors.
The social facet of this platform is the mining protocol for the prize pool. What's happening now is that the whales are making as much, sometimes more, than the people who buy these votes. But, it doesn't come out of the prize pool, basically, the prize pool pays the minnows, the minnows take that SAME MONEY and pour it back into the whales, who are giving NOTHING back to the platform at this point, just taking a profit, without participating on any active level. For new users, this is a huge disincentive. Not to mention, as a small voter, you can make more with the influence your vote can build than you can get from some paltry amount of SP rented out to a whale. AND you're increasing the gap between large and small accounts. If the Whales actually paid back ANY portion of those votes out of pocket, it might make sense. But this is how they will continue to rape the rewards pool, without anyone complaining, because they will filter it through your wallet. Essentially, it is the blockchain method of money laundering, and it will ruin this platform if left unchecked.
Thank you brother for this tutorial. I'm investigating and I read that he made an SP contract and then he sold the votes.
I would give some recommendations for the lease of SP, what parameters should I follow? I'm a little confused about NETT% APR. I had not done it before because voting for yourself would be as selfish as you say. But now I know I could sell the vote.
THIS IS rally great information to get promoted here on steem,
and want some little favor from you because there is many more to know about steem,
if you are here to guide then think for this steemian once,
feel free to contact me through this fb i.d,
i will wait for your message
@ilyastarar
https://web.facebook.com/fizza.doll.94009
Minnowbooster also needs owner or active key for authorization to use my upvote. Here is what they want,
I think posting key should be enough for upvoting. Can you clear it out for me.
Posting key is enough for operation of voting. Active key etc. is required to authorize the use of your votes. It happens through SteemConnect which is a safe application.
Ok thank you.
No sabia que esto existia, ya me active en ambas pero tengo una pregunta soy muy nueva y mi SP es poco esto me afecta? mi PV siempre esta por encima de 80% . GRacias
The vote buying and selling is really amazing.... I will get to give it a trial... Thanks @ilyastarar.
that's pretty cool to know....
well as long self-voting is "seen as normal" there will be bots and things like buy and sell votes.
I am not an active blogger so for me alternatives seems fine.
As long there is an inflation in Steem there will always be some alternatives.
But if I have to say if its either good or bad, I would tend to say that it will harm the system in the long run.
I think, It's ways for many steemian have good content but not have followers enough. Good post @ilyastarar.
totally impressed, great post.
It's informative post
thanks