It's not just you :D
The way I see it working:
1. Go to homepage.
2. Find unanswered questions that you can answer and answer them. In the process, elaborate with the OP, to help as much as you can.
3. Go to 1 until you become efficient enough (maybe 3 mins max), to be the first to answer a detailed answer (Usually the easy questions get a lot of hots, since more people are trying to answer those, so try to be the first to answer).
4. Hope that the question police won't close the question as not real question (usually noobs at programming or just on specified tags AND super-noobs at English can not even describe / explain what the problem is, but you can figure it out for them). I spot a problem here: The whole deal is to help people with their problems. Even if their problems include poor English / programming skills. You can not reject them by saying: "Hey! Learn English and then we'll tell you the solution." or "Hey! Come back in 3 months, when you'll be a better coder, so that you can explain better what you need. Then we'll tell you the solution.". I think some moderators stick so much to the rules, that forget the original plan of helping the fellow coders.
5. Go to 1 for countless hours (currently on popular tags, such as PHP, Javascript, jQuery, HTML I calculated that I can increase my rep about 10 per hour, near-fail rate, right?). You have nothing to lose. Answering makes you better. If you get a few downvotes, then you'll start check and double check before answering.
And a few rules of the thumb:
FIFO: Usually the OP gives the correct answer to the person that answers first (As it should be).
Reputation goes to reputation: When there are 4 or 5 similar answers, the persons with the higher rep get the most upvotes (reasonable, but probably unfair).
Use an example: Even if the question goes like "should I use A or B to do this?" and you know that A is the way to go, you don't just answer "Use A". You will get downvoted. But if you answer "Use A. I would do it like this: ...", then you might get a few upvotes (insane for me, but considering that you are helping to build a knowledge base, I'd say tolerable).
Learn stuff: the more you know, the more questions you may answer (now we're getting somewhere).
Spend your valuable free time on answering questions: It is a very nice feeling to give back to a community that you got from (and usually you get multiple times what you give). And it is a very nice feeling to support a worldwide knowledge base for your profession. But, since you compete with other professionals, you have to devote a lot of time to stand out, not by being the best, but by being the best on answering questions (not the same and kind of lame).
Stop thinking "Hey!? Did I just work for free the past x hours?": You just helped someone else! And in the future more people will benefit from your answer! (some things are just priceless :D).