This post should be one of the first posts you read when joining ShadowBot and Steem!

# 1) Managing Your Voting Power (VP)
Your VP is basically the blood for your account, and everytime you vote it costs you some blood! Your account regenerates new VP "blood" at a rate of approx. 20% every 24 hours. This ensures you have enough to vote each day without giving any one account too many votes. Remember everytime your VP goes down the amount your vote will generate will be less and less.

## Guideline:
Do not allow your VP to fall below 95% at any given time. Always allows your VP to recharge to 100% before voting again.

## Pro Tip:
Make a list of posts you wish to up vote manually and spread them out, this maximizes the earnings and ensures your VP does not get drained. (ShadowBot will be adding this feature shortly to make this process easy and automated)

You can check your VP at (simply replace @shadowbot with your username): https://steemd.com/@shadowbot

# 2) Power Up And Vest All Rewards To Your Steem Power (SP)
This is especially important for minnows (under 500 SP)! If you are taking all or most of your earnings out each week you are not building your influence on Steem. This not only takes away from your earnings but also directly effects your Pool Priority in ShadowBot.
## Guideline:
Ensure at least 50% of your earnings are vested each week into your SP. You should be seeing your SP go up each payout.

## Pro Tip:
Investing 100% of your rewards to your SP will exponentially increase your earnings and influence on Steem as well as ShadowBot. Simply select 100% for rewards until you have at least enough SP to be above the FVL (currently 1250 SP)!

# 3) Quality NOT Quantity
The amount of content and number of posts and replies you make mean nothing if the value you add is little or none. When you create a post, have a reason for writing it. Engage in conversations with others and ensure that you add value not distract from the topic or attempt to change it.
## Guideline:
Create posts that follow your trend. People who stick to a more specific theme(s) and provide valuable insight and information tend to earn far better than those who make random "facebook style" posts.

## Pro Tip:
When making a post ensure you stay on topic for your audience. When making replies, avoid linking back to your own posts until you have developed a real conversation and have a really good post worth sharing. If you have insight into a question someone is asking about, create a post and let them know thanks to the post and replies it led you to create your new post. Doing it this way builds a useful connection/web of information. DO NOT use this to spam your links around or you will get flagged hard by many many many people!

# 4) Replying To Your Audience
If you are one of those people guilty of not replying to people who comment on your posts you are missing out on a huge opportunity to build your audience and thereby your earning potential!

## Guideline:
Outside of spam comments (example: "Good post!"), you should always engage back with each person that replies to your post. The longer the chain of replies the more likely it is that they will not only follow you, up vote your post, resteem your post, BUT, also get some up votes for comments you create.

## Pro Tip:
If you engage with someone(s) in your own replies you set the topic of discussion and are building off what they said. Do not get argumentative, but rather be constructive. When you find someone that you really agree with or added some useful information, be sure to thank them and give that comment a little up vote. We have seen replies to replies to a post (nested replies) earn more than 10x what the original post did simply based on how great the content provided was. Again see #3!

# Conclusion
ShadowBot and Steem both operate best when we all follow these base guidelines. These are meant to be guidelines not rules, however the closer you follow them the faster you will see big earnings on Steem and ShadowBot!


# For more information on ShadowBot:
FAQ: https://shadowbot.us/shadowbot/faq.php

Signup/Login: https://shadowbot.us/shadowbot/login.php