Voting on new post won't help much even if you chance upon post that goes viral. You need to have member who is high steem power to vote on your comment to see good earnings. Every once in a while you will see certain members making high earnings in their post or comments. Exactly like how a MLM Company would operate just to show that there is potential to earn. But no matter how hard you try, you would realize that the platform is not created equally.
The owner is very smart in creating the type of lottery winning illusion to get massive amount of traffics to the site. I think as of now the traffic has exceeded even Reddit. Traffics are driven by greed of the possibility to make money through posting 'quality' contents. Which is a big joke in itself as you can see some of the contents in trending are just simple "Hi". Most of the time you would be 'encourage' by other members to persist and post more 'unique and quality' contents. This helps Steemit with ranking their site due to large amount of new contents posted aka doing free SEO for steemit. By posting comments frequently through members usage, Google bot recognizes Steemit as an authority site thus ranking them even higher.
Apart from that, 90% of steem mined belongs to miner while 10% are shared amount members of steemit who post contents and participate in voting and commenting.