Thanks for the comment! You are totally right about the up voting. The rewards are minimal, but I would say about 90% goes to the author, not 99%... ;)

I experimented on two articles last week where I was within the first 5 votes of both articles that now have over 300 votes and $250 in rewards. Still have a couple days before the payout, but we'll see if that early voting helped...

Your last paragraph is spot on. Also, to get followers early, I found that resteeming popular authors is an easy way to "generate" content that appears to have a lot of activity.

BTW, I just hit 100 followers! BOOOOOMMMM!!!