At no cost at all, would you like to be able to automatically upvote those few Steemians you always wish to support? Would you like to keep voting for them even if you are offline or on a vacation? Does it seem profitable to you to vote at your desired timings such that you earn maximum curation rewards? Do you wish to automatically reward people who comment regularly on your posts? If your answer to these questions is yes, then you must learn how to use SteemAuto.

Image designed via Canva.com and background image is free to use from the inbuilt gallery. SteemAuto logo is used with permission.

This post in sequential to all the posts I have done previously on Steemit ecosystem, in which I have covered different services every Steemian can use to enhance his or her Steemit experience and benefit from the economic opportunities available thanks to the benevolence of Steem blockchain. A list of all the covered services is available at the end of this post, with more to be added regularly.

What is SteemAuto?

SteemAuto is an absolutely free automation service created by @mahdiyari, who is a witness and you can vote for him if you find his service useful. SteemAuto offers multiple automation options which you can leverage to your advantage. All of these options are covered thoroughly in this post. When I covered the popular autovoting service SteemVoter, I promised to cover its alternative too. Here's what I had said:-

Is there an alternative? Yes, there is one that I know of but haven't used it yet. I will use that one too and cover it completely and also compare it with SteemVoter.

SteemAuto is that alternative which I have used for three weeks now and am fully satisfied with its services. However, SteemAuto offers a lot more than autovoting on others' posts. A comparison with between SteemAuto and SteemVoter is available towards the end of this post.

How to Use SteemAuto?

SteemAuto offers multiple services to automate various Steemit processes including voting and posting. There are five things you can do through SteemAuto.

Fanbase:- Automatically upvote your favorite authors.
Upvote Comments:- Automatically upvotes comments by your favorite followers.
Curation Trail:- Create or join curation trails to earn good curation rewards.
Schedule Posts:- Create posts now and publish them in future.
Claim Rewards:- Automatically claim rewards to your wallet balance.

All these services offer automation that can help you in many ways. While these services are covered exclusively in the post, you fill first need to register yourself with SteemAuto.

Register With SteemAuto

To register with SteemAuto, go to https://steemauto.com and click Login/Register. Enter your Steemit username, an email and a password to initiate registration. Click register after entering all the details. You will see a message below the box as shown below.

Go to your Steemit wallet and send 0.001 SBD to @steemauto with the given memo. After the transaction is completed, come back to the website again to complete registeration. You will get a success message as shown below.

Go to the Login box on the right and enter your username and password to login. Prove your humanity by solving the recaptcha as well.

After logging in, you need to authorize SteemAuto to be able to do the automatic work for you.

Authorize SteemAuto

On the welcome page after logging in, you will be asked to authorize SteemAuto to use your posting role.

I chose SteemConnect, which took me to the SteemConnect page. Click Continue.

Enter your Steemit username and Private Posting Key and sign in.

That's it. You are now good to use SteemAuto and its services.

Configure Your Settings

All your autovoting activity depends on your voting power settings. Once you set a minimum voting power, all your autovotes are cast only when your VP is equal to or more than your set limit. So, it is very important to take into consideration your voting priorities and set an appropriate limit.

To update your settings, go to your dashboard and click settings.

After clicking settings, you can click to edit your voting power limit.

The shown VP is 70 % but you may want to increase it to a level where autovoting does not affect your manual curation. I updated my voting priorities some days ago to make the best use of my voting power. I set 85 % as the limit for SteemAuto. It gives me flexibility to manually vote till the VP falls to 80 % and sell votes for profit if I am offline and VP reaches 89 % or above. Decide what's best for you.

Let's cover the five automation services now.

1. Fanbase : Autovote Your Favorite Authors

If you are fan of someone's content, why not add her/him to your autovoting list and reward them whether you get to see the post or not. It is a way to recognize the efforts of good authors. Many of the earlier Steemians have become good friends and have added each other in autovoting lists. Your reasons to add anyone to your list can vary.

Go to your dashboard and click Fanbase.

To add an author to your autovoting list, simply add his/her Steemit username and click follow, like I added @inquiringtimes below. He's a great one to follow.

But when you add an author, the default setting is that your vote will be cast immediately when he or she posts with 100 % weight. You should adjust the timing and weight of your vote to suit your needs and to get maximum curation reward. If you understand Steemit reward system, "the earlier a vote is made within the initial 30-minute window, the less curation rewards the voting account receives." However, as per @steemitblog, HF20 will reduce this window from 30 to 15 minutes.

When I added my colleague @jbn to the list, the default settings were 100 % vote at 0 minutes. I had to change that.

I simply clicked settings and updated the parameters. A 55 % vote on almost every post is more powerful than full votes done manually on a few posts. You can do the same.

Every author you add will be shown in the list of your fanbase. I personally like to support hardworking minnows and newbies rather than voting for whales and established authors. Luke Stokes (@lukestokes) is an exception though. He is my ideal Steemian and he does not buy votes.

There are two main things you should check to ensure that your votes are well deserved.

That the author is not abusing your automatic votes by posting too much. If you have set 100 % vote for someone and he or she posts three times a day, you will lose 6 % voting power. But it will happen only when your VP is above the limit you set.
That the quality of the posts receiving automatic votes from you is satisfactory. The ease of voting automatically should not mean easy votes for bad content. I advocate the sensible use of all available services and we should all care about where rewards are going from the reward pool.

That's it for autovoting. SteemAuto's fanbase service does everything that SteemVoter does, and better. Do see the comparison of both at the end. It would be an honor if you choose to add me to your autovoting list. I use bidbots or big votes only after 20-30 window is over so that my early voters get maximum rewards from my best-performing posts.

2. Automatically Upvote Comments

I don't know how you view comments in general but I have always taken them very seriously. I emphasize comments a lot and have shared extensive content on the topic. There's a reason why comments are your best way out of frustration but you should also know how not to comment. In fact, I conducted a healthy engagement contest in which I and some other Steemians, notably @clumsysilverdad, rewarded comments generously when SBD was well above $15 and Steem was reaching for $8 in the first week of January. It was a lot of reward just for commenting. I wanted to show the power of commenting to newbies.

You can see how much I care about comments. SteemAuto enables us to upvotes comments by our chosen users automatically. I think it is incredibly useful service and the one which I will optimize to make the best use of. To add people to the lists, go to Upvote Comments.

I added @kivsha as the first beneficiary of this feature for his unparalleled support for me. (Thank you!) I do wish to increase my SP gradually so that I have even bigger votes to give. A rise in Steem's price can also do wonders in this regard. Currently, the number of comments I get restricts my vote weight. In hope of rewarding more people, I had to decrease the voting weight of comments.

Choose your options based on your specifics. But I would encourage you to rewards comments whether you do it manually or automatically.

3. Join or Create Curation Trail

Joining someone's curation trail means automatically upvoting whenever the owner of the trail upvotes any post. The best use case of curation trails is to the ones from the best-known curators on the platform. A famous curation trail is run by @curie, which picked two of my posts from my first week on Steemit and they shot up to hot section and paid out $200+ each in rewards. It has 573 members.

Curie is a community project that discovers and rewards exceptional content.

I mentioned Curie as an example. When @curie votes any content, most of the 573 members vote too and it goes hot or trending. There, it gets more votes. The early voters get maximum curation rewards. And that is what the benefit of joining trails is.

Enough of introduction. Let's see how to join a trail. Simply click Curation Trail from the dashboard and click Follow to join any of the popular trails. You can also search for a particular trail.

I have joined only one trail so far and it is @utopian-1up because I found it interesting and profitable by design. It votes on accepted Utopian posts only and that too before the bot vote. You can know more about it here if interested.

I set the minimum time to zero because trail votes happen only when the main account votes.

Let me share with you the difference between Scale and Fixed option when joining curation trails from the official FAQ.

Difference between Scale and Fixed?

Fixed voting weight means you will upvote with exact percentage you entered.
Scaled voting weight means your voting weight will be changed (i.e. scaled) by the trail's voting weight. For example, if you followed a trail with this option set to 10% then if that trail upvotes a post by 50%, your upvote weight will be 5% (10% of 50%)

Important Note:- In case of a fanbase, comment voting and curation trail, the minimum voting power that you set in the beginning will have its impact. No matter how many people you add to autovote lists or how many trails you join, your votes will be cast only when your VP is equal to or more than the limit you set.

4. Schedule Posts

Scheduling posts is a unique option provided by SteemAuto. You can use it in many ways to keep your Steemit blog consistently updated. The best use case of this option, in my opinion, is to create multiple posts when you have time, and schedule them to publish when you yourself may be inactive or away from Steemit. People who regularly go on vacations can easily leverage this opportunity. I am surely going to use this option before I go home from my workplace.

Another good use that comes to my mind is to create posts in our free time and publish it when maximum people are online for more visibility. You will have to figure that out based on your timezone and other factors.

How to do this is fairly simple. Click Schedule Posts, add the title, content, and tags, and choose a time to publish it later.

It is more appropriate and flexible to use Steemit/Busy or any markdown editor to create your posts and paste the content on the SteemAuto page. As of right now, the feature is under maintenance. I guess it is being improved. Nonetheless, the minute you read this, it might be available and you may use it.

5. Automatically Claim Rewards

Normally, what we all do is to click our Wallet and see if there is some reward to be claimed. If there is any, we have to redeem it manually to add to our SBD or SP balance. I like it that way because it helps me analyze my rewards. When the amount is big, like 100 SBD or more, it is pure joy. But there are people who would find the automatic claims beneficial.

To enable automatic claiming of rewards, click Claim Rewards from the dashboard and then Click to Enable on the page.

Consequently, whenever you have a reward to claim, it will automatically be redeemed to your balance. You can always check your wallet history to have an overview. With this, the five services have been covered. I hope you find them useful. The comparison between SteemAuto and SteemVoter that I promised is what remains.

SteemAuto vs. SteemVoter

Let me simplify things for you and share with you the comparison in form of a table.

You can decide for yourself which service you wish to use.

Conclusion

Regardless of what service I cover, my ultimate aim remains to educate Steemians in the best possible way and let them know what opportunities exist within the Steem ecosystem. The information I pass on to you is honest, straightforward, and useful. This guide serves that core purpose of education and helpfulness. It would be great if you can resteem it. Resteeming useful content is a great way of providing value to your followers.

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.

Steem on!

A list of all the guides concerning Steemit ecosystem and the services enhancing it is found below for anyone who may find them useful.