If you want to hit the Trending or Hot pages on Steemit then bots seem to the only real way of achieving that unless you have an epic post and a huge following!

But why would you want to hit those pages? If you would simply like to grow your account on Steemit then I recommend (as others have said) reaching out to other blogs on Steemit and (crucially) leaving well-thought out and valuable comments. Comments are hugely under-rated. They provide good visibility for you and an opp to earn upvotes. I think in the early days, newbies should double-down on commenting.

For your own blog posts, I think the best way is to invest the majority of your time in the Dapps that have decent delegations - therefore decent potential upvotes. So Steemhunt, Dtube, Dlive, Steempress, 'Musing' etc. A vote from these platforms can seriously speed-up your growth here.

So in summary, I would avoid bots and comment like crazy plus create some posts on the various Steem Dapps.