Delegating is a nice way to support communities and get a little bit of income. The 2.979% interest on HP is what you get by just leaving it sitting there unused.
But assuming that (like me) you're not a super coder who can get projects approved and paid by the DHF or run a witness node, then for ordinary non-techie Hivers the best earnings are (in order);
- Interest on HBD
- Author rewards - variable, and can depend on the quality of posts, where you're posting, how many followers you've got etc.
- Curation - i.e. upvoting posts.
Curation has additional benefits because it can help build your own follower base. If I see someone regularly upvoting my posts, I'll go off and look at what they're writing. If I like it, I'll follow them and start upvoting their posts in return.
I do most of my curation manually, but it's also possible to automate the process through tools like Hive.vote. You can also monitor your curation APR (and lots of other data) through Hivestats.io. My current curation APR is 5.25%, but that's down from a normal 8-9% because real life has kept me busy for the last couple of weeks and my upvoting has slipped a little !
You're never going to be a millionaire purely from curation, but it's earned me around 1300HP so far, as well as finding me some great new friends 😀
