Yes, your revenues depend on your Steem Power. The more Steem power you have, the more money you get. Revenues also depend on other people's upvotes for your and your upvotes for the others. If you share and appreciate worthy stuff, your position improves.
If you sell your Steem Power (Power down), your revenues decrease till you get it back.
The Dollar value is Steem value in USD actually.
By the way this app may help you to get into it: https://steemit.com/steemit/@godfish/steemit-app-that-you-shold-know-and-use
Thanks for the info. So I went to Block trades and got a new address to send the money to bitcoin and I still don't know where to enter that address. Then I went to power down to see if that would send me anywhere, clicked it and nothing happened. I see I have Steem dollars but can only transfer to a bank account, trade, buy sell, etc. I still don't see where to put that bitcoin address or if I should do it through dollars or power. This is a lot to learn!
At first, change your Steem Dollars to Steem. You can do so at local Steemit market: https://steemit.com/market
Powering down - transfering Steem Power to Steem - takes 13 weeks while each week a certain percentage of you Steem Power is converted. I believe it is not wise at all but it's your choice.
Do you use Steemit chat? https://steemit.chat Meet me there at channel "general" for more hints. It would be much swifter than comments.