I plan to run contests of sorts (mostly in food and travel contest posts) ... I've wanted to do that but I can't give away tiered awards of 10, 20, 30, 50+ SBD at a time, if my rewards per post was only yielding less than $5 to $10 per payout. I'd basically run out of my own Steem, Steem Power and SBD.

So to answer what you mentioned, I'm doing BOTH. I've delegated lots of my SP to another account to self grow ... and then i'm doing a mixture of bid bots and powering down, so that I'll have SBD laying around to do the contests I want to do. I'm figuring out a balance amongst them all.

Thanks for your constructive questions and comments :)