1. Ecency

Ecency gives you Ecency Points for doing your normal Hive blogging activities.

• Each post you do gets you up to 15 Points. Each subsequent post gets you 3.75 (3/4 initial) Points less.
• Each comment you write gets you up to 5 Points. Each subsequent comment gets you 1/3 of a Point less.
• Up to 1 Point for each upvote on someone's article. Each subsequent upvote gets you 1/20 of a Point less.
• 1 Point per reblog. Each subsequent reblog gets you 1/10 of a Point less.
• While being logged in you get 0.25 Points credited, no clue if it follows some pattern or is random, no idea. If you know how the heartbeat points are distributed, please comment and enlighten me.
• You get 10 Points for your first login/joining Ecency
• You get 10 Points for "consistent" usage, no clue what the criteria are for that, but I get it almost daily, so probably some kind of minimum interactions on ecency. But exact requirements elude me again, so feel free to educate me in the comments.
• 100 points a day for 1000HP delegation, way out of my budget, as with most of you probably as well.
• Never created a community, but if you are interested you get apparently get 20 points for a post into that community.

Now the big, WHY?

You can use those Ecency Points to do 3 things:

1. Gift to people - That's noble, but not really in the scope of this article.
2. Promote a Post. - Haven't tried that myself, but if Ecency you see those highlighted posts all over your feed/communities. But since I haven't tried it myself I can't really comment on how useful it is to improve your following or Hive income.
3. Boost a Post. - This is the main use case for me at least. Boosting a post submits the post to an ecency curator. This curator then decides if your post is up to Ecency's post quality standard. In case they decide it is worth their upvote, you get a 1$ upvote for each 150 Ecency you spent on the boost. Should they decline the upvote or maybe run out of vote power they credit your Ecency Points back after a 24h period, then you can use them again to try to boost another post the next day.

Let's see what is possible if you are using Ecency daily:

Heartbeat	Vote	Post	Giveaways(comments)	Reblog	Consistant Use	Sum
20x	12x	1x	4x	4x	1x
0.25	(1+...+0.4)	15	(5+...+4)	(1+...+0.7)	10
5	9.1	15	18	3.4	10	60.5

Each 150 Ecency Points gets you 50c in HP+HBD value. So every Ecency = $0.00333, therefor 60.5 Ecency equal roughly $0.20 each day. Not bad as an additional revenue source for something you already do.

2. Upvoting

As established in the previous tip using 12 upvotes can get you 3c on ecency. The problem with upvoting without enough HP is you have to generate 0.001 HP from your upvotes to get any payouts and unless you have like 40 HP already you rarely get anything out of your vote. Now there are a couple of things we can actually do to a) increase our HP without having to invest in HP b) maximize the payout from our votes.

A.1. Steemmonster delegation

If we run out of resource credits, we get a delegation of the steemmonsters account so that we can continue to transact. So try to drain your resource credits to 0% by interacting with the Hive blockchain, for example posting, commenting voting until you run out. Then try to buy, combine, start a quest, or whatever inside splinterlands. Rinse and repeat until you reach the maximum delegation somewhere around 20HP from the steemmonsters account.

A.2. Giftgiver.site

Try to get a delegation from them, they provide you with 10 HP for 7 days.

B. Maximizing the upvote rewards

I don't understand a hundred percent how the upvote HP reward works, but my understanding is you get a higher reward if you upvote a high-paying post/comment before the bigger votes come in. So being early in discovering quality posts pays. Finding good posts that are high paying is often difficult, but due to splinterlands/steemmonsters account giving high-paying upvotes on their Weekly Battle Challenge and Social Media Challenge, we get a plethora of potentially high-paying posts with a lot less research. Just take a look at the recent posts in Battle/Social Challenge and pick high quality yet still low paying posts from the comment submissions.

Example:

If you chose wisely you can get an additional 1-5c on your daily votes to jumpstart your Hive blogging / Splinterlands account for free.

3. @reward.app

Unfortunately, we can't combine this option with the Ecency Reward Points version we used before if you decide to use reward.app lose out on 15 Ecency Points for doing your post from their platform. Reward.app is only working either hive.blog or peakd.comhttps://peakd.com.

So what does reward.app do you ask?

The converts help you to get all of your posting rewards in liquid form. Instead of you receiving 50% HP and 50% HBD, you set them as a 100% beneficiary for your post. In turn, they send you 47.5% of the author payout as HBD and 47.5% as Hive (instead of HP). They keep 1% and an extra 4% of the author's cut is sent to the curators to incentives them to vote more on your posts. The 4% incentive is optional and can be turned off. Details at this link.

Why should you use it?

I mean, of course, you lose some equity by using reward.app, but if you have enough HP for your basic blogging needs and you do require funds to accelerate your Splinterlands earning it might be a useful idea.

If you have not started your Splinterlands journey, give it a go. Click here to join now.