It can be a little confusing but I’ll give it a shot. You have Hive in liquid form and staked Hive as HP.
The more HP the higher your upvote. You have a percentage cap on how many upvotes you can make that are monetised per day and this amount reduces the financial amount each time you upvote. You can set another percentage of each upvote as you are upvoting. I normally keep this at 100% because I am generous and it’s only a few cents each time.

In general you want 1000HP for every US$0.01 upvote at 100% vote power and 100% vote slider.
I have over 10,000HP so my upvote is about US$0.10 at 100% vote power and 100% vote slider.
I have been here 6 years though so it can take some time to get to level.

You can still upvote 100% under the 1000HP amount and even beyond your daily cap if you just want name recognition. It’s what I did in the beginning.

Look around for communities that you enjoy. Join them, create blog posts for them, upvote people’s work even if you only have a small amount of HP. Power up as much as you can.

You can buy and sell swap tokens on Hive Engine for profit.

In general, you want to engage as much as possible.

You can make videos for 3Speak, etc.

Also, you get a curation reward for upvoting comments and posts.