How to Earn Free Steem - #NewSteem Curation
I am always looking for more ways to make my money work for me. I was attracted to POS coins at first as I figured it would be a good way to earn passive income. After finding out that you need to spend a ton of money to be able to get a small amount of rewards I decided to look into other avenues.
I then found Steem where I could not only earn crypto by making blog posts on Steem, but then earning passive income through voting articles I enjoyed I was really intrigued (even if you could only afford a small amount of Steem). With the introduction of #NewSteem and increased curation reward I've decided to take control back of my 3000 SP and start curating again and testing out what works best to earn the most curation rewards.
Curation Reward Potential
If you look at my previous post I found I could earn around 2.8 steem per week per 1000 SP delegated at an APR of 12.6% per week on Dlease.io. Right now the max APR is only 11.6% so you couldn't even earn that currently.
According the @abh12345 Curation and Engagement League I was able to earn 3.8 SP per 1000 Steem per week off of curation and was able to come in 1st place. Last week I placed second and was only able to get 3.38 SP per 1000 SP per week.
For those that don't know you can use SteemWorld to track your curation efficiency, pretty much in real time. Taking a look at mine currently, I'm expected to make around 11.2 SP this coming week in curation rewards which is somewhere between my second place finish and my first place finish as far as efficiency goes, but is still 0.5 - 1 SP better than I can get on DLease at an APR of 12.6%
Passive Curation
If you would like to start curating "passively" you could always join my curation trail on SteemAuto. I am currently following @anomadsoul as I know he's always doing a great job curating great and original content as a curator for @ocd, so if you don't want to follow me he's a great choice as well.
The picture above also shows some popular curation trails and where you need to go to either search for a curation trail or join some popular ones. I will admit a few of those I see in the top are probably no longer active so you may want to do some research before joining these as I don't know if they are even voting anymore.
Thoughts on Curation Providing Passive Income
I think they've done a great job with #newsteem and the amount of curation rewards you can earn. If my calculations are correct I've earned about 14% APR on this weeks curation rewards. As I mentioned in my previous post, most investors will tell you, anything that provides a double digit return on an investment is pretty good especially when the risk (which there is no risk in earning from curating) is low.
Ease - 5 - Either manually upvote content that you enjoy reading or set-up a curation trail and forget. The hardest part about this is to ensure a respectable Voting Power is maintained (around 70 - 80%).
Upkeep - 1 - Either manually voting or keeping up with a curation trail from week to week, this is one of the less "passive" ways of earning Steem, but still can be set-up to set and forget. Only downside is if your curation trail quits curating then you're no longer earning passive income.
ROI - 5 - this has so far been the best ROI. I'm debating on delegating to @ocdb again for a few weeks to see around what kind of ROI they are providing, but I have a feeling with the increased curation rewards it's going to be hard to beat straight up curation.
User Interface - 5 - UI is either the upvote button or Steem-Auto. The upvote button is pretty straighforwards I would assume and SteemAuto site is pretty easy to navigate and set your preferences. If anyone would like a SteemAuto guide in the future let me know and I'll be happy to write one.
Another great reason to curate yourself is you get to keep complete control over your Steem Power. It's not delegated to another account and you don't have to wait a week for it to come back if you decide to Undelegate. I'm sure this has some benefits that I didn't capture as well.