How To Make Money From Crypto Bounty Programs — Easy Tutorial

Here is what you can learn from this guide/tutorial on How To Make Money As A Bounty Hunter For Crypto Projects:

1. What are bounty programs and how do they work
2. How to chose the bounty programs with generous payments
3. How to grow your social media account to maximize bounty
4. Best Bounty Platforms — the best places where you can find bounty programs
5. Other Resources, tips&tricks

I am doing bounty hunting for almost a year now. During this time I got to learn how to select the programs that have the highest chance of succeeding and that are most likely to pay well. Since I am not doing this full time I want to get into those programs that have the highest payment and the best chance to succeed.

For who is this guide?

This guide will help anyone that wants to make some or a lot of money. More accurately to make cryptocurrency that can be converted to fiat or used as cryptocurrency to tread, hold or pay for stuff.

This thing ‘bounty hunting for ICOs’ can be done both by people that have a few minutes per day, 1–7 days a week, as well by people that can dedicate hours and hours each day. Both non-technical and tech-savvy people can work on the numerous types of tasks available.

If you ever wondered how you can make money from social media (twitter, facebook) without investment, this could be for you. If you ever wondered how to make money blogging (writing articles) this can be for you. If you are a crypto enthusiast that want to monetize your knowledge and passion this can be an easy way for you to make money.

I am sure that this guide will open the eyes of many that are barely beginning to do this and even those that never thought to do this. This is an opportunity.
And I am almost sure that even veterans in this field will pick a thing or two.
Some parts contain a lot of information. You may want to read twice those parts or bookmark this page to come back later, especially if you are not accustomed to cryptocurrency at all.

I put over 12 hours in this guide. I hope it doesn’t have many errors. Hope that you enjoy it.

There are close to 5,000 words in this guide. This means that it will take around 20 minutes to read all of this. Are you ready?

Let’s start this.

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Chapter 1 — What are bounty programs and how do they work

owl hunting for some bounties :)

All new cryptocurrency project need marketing to sell their coins during the initial coin release (ICO). Many of these projects opt to do their marketing using 2 things:
A. Marketing agency or in-house marketing
B. and a bounty program.

In the bounty program, they offer cryptocurrency in exchange for promotion, if their ICO is a success. This means that the payment is not guaranteed. The payment is conditioned by the ICO success. This resembles more to an investment than to a freelancing job.

For this reason, it is important to choose projects that have a high chance of success. I will talk about this in the second chapter.

Most programs will pay using their own tokens. As most tokens are based on Ethereum platform you will need an Ethereum wallet. You can use their Microsoft wallet or any other wallet that supports Ethereum tokens. I prefer Metamask as it is easy to easy. It is an add-on that works on chrome and brave browsers. Don’t use exchange addresses as you will not receive your payments.

Here are the tasks that can be part of a bounty program. You can join one, multiple or all tasks available from a bounty program, as long as you meet their requirements.

a) Content Creation — videos/article writing and posting

Usually, you have to write around 500 words about the project. You have to read the whitepaper (project details) and do research about their particular market. The point of views that are unique are appreciated. So be original and try to offer an analysis with pros and cons.

Ideal is to have your own website (top TLD like .com). A top TLD is around $10 per year and a good hosting like Siteground is around $50 per year. Once you start to get consistent traffic you can think of upgrading your hosting package. But the startup package can stand even to 10,000 visits per month. So you will be good. Hitting 10,000 visitors per month will make you enough money and you will be happy to upgrade your hosting.
You can have your own website up in less than 10 minutes using a CMS like WordPress. Customization takes longer, but for that, you can always hire someone to do that.

There are plenty of services that charge a few hundred dollars to set-up your website and make it look clean. From there, all you have to do is connect to your Wordpress Dashboard and post your articles.

If you need help with setting up your website, I recommend this service on Fiverr. I used it a couple times to set some websites that I used to promote Amazon affiliate products. Decent service for the price asked.

Alternatives to having your own domain are to use a free blogging platform like Steemit, Medium. Even platforms like Weebly, Blogspot, and Tumblr. There are a few downsides of using free blogging platforms for bounty hunting. You don’t have control over your articles. You have to follow the rules of that platform and even then you can have your blog suspended. Following the rules should take care of that risk, but there is a small chance of getting your blog suspended. Keep in mind that your article has to be online at least until the end of the bounty program.

Another downside is that some bounty programs won’t accept articles on specific platforms like on Blogspot for example. And some blogging platforms are tired of bounty hunters that spam by posting content that they don’t own.
On the other hand, some bounty programs have special bounties for articles on big websites, Medium or Steemit platform.

Steemit and Medium are a nice add-on to your own website as you can join their ‘partnership’ programs, where you are rewarded with crypto (money) for articles that are appreciated by the other users. Be aware that Medium accepts people in their ‘Partnership’ program only from certain countries.
If you plan to write dozens of articles it will be useful to have both your own website and accounts on Medium and Steemit. Concentrate on your main website and use the later for specific campaigns if you are planning to write tons of articles.

Once your website will start to gain traffic you will be able to monetize that traffic as well, with ads and affiliate links without being restricted. This way you will make money not only from the bounty campaigns but also from advertising.

For video creation, you have to post it on Youtube. Usually, they have criteria here as well, like a minimum number for subscribers and/or a minimum number of views on the video.

b) Social media promotion

This includes posting, re-sharing and liking content related to the ICO on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Reddit.

Most programs have bounties for Twitter and Facebook. Lately more and more include Reddit as this is a platform with less spam than others. Also, the quality of the users on Reddit is better, in my experience. Probably because of the Reddit system of upvoting/downvoting and ghosting spam account.
More on how to grow your following and interactions on social media on Chapter 3.

c) Sharing content on your telegram group

This is for those that own telegram groups related to business, crypto or ICOs. It may be a bit harder to build your own group, but doable. As I don’t have experience on this I will let you search on google on how to do that.

d) Signature on Bitcointalk forum

Bitcointalk is a forum. For a long time, it was the main platform for announcing new crypto projects and bounty programs.

Basically, for this bounty, you need a Bitcointalk profile with some authority. For that authority, you have to post valuable content.

e) Translation of website, whitepaper, Bitcointalk announcement and/or bounty thread

This is pretty self-explanatory. This bounty has the highest payout usually.
The programs that offer such a bounty usually have a list of languages that they accept.

f) Bug reports

Depending on the program this can be about bugs on the website and usually about bugs in their beta software/service.

So if you are a tech guy this can be entertaining and rewarding as well.

g) Developers bounties

These are technical tasks. I haven’t participated in any as I don’t have the skills for this type of bounties. There are a couple of platforms where these campaigns are posted.

h) Referrals

If you have friends or a dedicated followers base that will buy coins on ICOs that you recommend, you will get a cut of the amount they spend.

i) other small tasks like following the project social media accounts, joining or being active on Telegram

These are easy to spot as they take a few seconds to do and the payout is really, really low. Usually, I do these actions only if I participate in their social media bounty campaigns.

Most bounty programs run before and even during the ICO period. A few have bounty programs post-ICO.

To recap.

You are rewarded based on the tasks you make IF the ICO is a success. Success usually means that the ICO reaches the soft cap (minimum investment needed for the project to start). There are plenty of ways to do so you select the projects with the highest chances of success. Read on chapter 2 for that.

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Chapter 2 — How to choose the bounty programs for a high income

choosing the juicy projects to increase your income

This step is as important as the actual work that you will do to promote a project. It is crucial that you choose ICOs that are legit and with optimum chances for success. Otherwise, you may work in vain or for peanuts.

For this, I will refer you to this article: 10 Experts Share the Do’s and Don’ts of Investing in Crypto ICOs. It talks about the essentials of how to choose an ICO when you want to invest. We are not investing, we are bounty hunters, but most of those rules apply to us as well.

Here are the highlights of that article on how to chose ICOs with a good chance to succeed:

Check their team.

Check to see these are real people. Check out multiple sources, google them and the companies they declare they have worked for.

Another thing that I do is that I will interact with their team. No matter if it’s on twitter, telegram or email. This gives me a sense of how they are. I am looking for transparency and people oriented towards solutions.

Check their whitepaper, everything on their website and all about their market.

If you don’t know much about their market, check multiple reviews on the project. There are a lot of projects that want to take on big competitors even though they don’t come with anything new to the table other than the so-called blockchain implementation to that business model. Don’t get me wrong. Blockchain technology is awesome, but far too many projects market their main advantage being the blockchain. And for most projects, this is not enough to make that project a success. So check project, market, and competition.

Check their promises.

I avoid unrealistic, to good to be true promises. I avoid projects that rely on hype and big promises.

Personally, I avoid projects with bonuses of over 30%.

Even if the project gets the minimum funding their coin will go down even in most cases, especially if their bonuses were higher than 30%. Since bounty hunters are paid usually after a few weeks or months after the ICO end, you don’t get the chance to dump the coin on a decent price once they get listed on exchanges and you will end up with pennies.

Check the number of followers on social media and the engagement.
Even when the project is newly announced they should have a minimum of 500–1000 followers on facebook, twitter or telegram. This is my own choice. As you gain experience you might choose different numbers, add or subtract from the criteria presented here. And I encourage you to do that.

Engagement is crucial. The more followers they have you should see at least some engagement even before the bounty program start (when bounty hunters will increase engagement).

If a project has no engagement (shares, re-shares, comments, likes) it is a sign that the followers are either artificial or not interested in the project. Either way, this is not good.

Now to another juicy part of selecting the bounty programs.

How to calculate which bounties will have a high payment.

Depending on the rules of the program you get either a share of the bounty or an exact amount. In chapter 4 I will talk about 2 platforms (Bitcointalk and Bounty0x) where bounties are posted. One has bounties where you get a fixed number of tokens per task and one has bounties where you get shares of the total bounty pool.

On Bounty0x they show you already an estimation of the amount that you can make on each specific task. All I do is take that value and divided to 3 for a worst-case scenario, in case the project gets minimum funding and/or the coin will drop rapidly after launch.

On Bitcointalk, for most bounties, you get a share. Here is how I calculate my possible share if I decide that the project is attractive.

I calculate the minimum bounty in case of ICO reaches the soft cap. Then I estimate the number of bounty hunters. This comes with experience or checking closed bounty programs where you can see the spreadsheets with the participants. If you do your research you will start to see a pattern.

I will take as an example a bounty that is already closed. The bounty was for CardStack ICO.

Here are the bounty rules. They promised a bounty pool of 1% of the total tokens sold. This project announced a hard-cap of $30–35 million, but no soft cap. So I ‘assumed’ a $10 million soft cap.

So the minimum bounty pool that I estimated was:
1% x $10,000,000 = $100,000
If the bounty would be a success the bounty is $300,000-$350,000.
But we are interested in the worst case scenario. So we will continue the calculation with the minimum bounty pool of $100,000.

I was interested in the article campaign. That campaign had a 30% share of the bounty pool. So, we have:
30% x $100,000 = $30,000

For article bounty campaign I estimated 1000 eligible bounty hunters. Now we have:
$30,000 / 1,000 bounty hunters = $30
Now some will get more, some less, depending on the article quality and reach. Each campaign has specific rules.

After this calculation, take in consideration that depending on the market conditions the coin might go up or down after launch.

For example in the past year, from what I’ve scanned, I think over 70% of the coins launched dropped in price. Some dropped even with 90% just in a few weeks or even days after launch.

So. After the calculation of the possible share, I like to divide that by 2 or even 3 to estimate the actual money that I will get.

At this point, I would have a minimum possible payout of $10-$15 for a 500 words article.

At the end of ICO, they reached over $35 million. They got over 3,000 submissions for article campaign. Out of those, a little over 400 got validated and paid.

Most decent articles got around 10,000 Cardstack coins. Once the coin got available on exchanges it hit $0,006. So that means that for a decent article you could’ve got $60. $60 that you can convert to fiat, other coins or hold those coin if you want to invest/gamble.

Another thing that I do when I see a project that I think it can be a success, but it is freshly announced and they don’t have much following to check engagement and people reactions, I either jump on the bounty if the payout seems really attractive or I check back in a few weeks. It depends on my mood and how much risk I am willing to take.

When I check for juicy bounties I am looking at bounties that most people are not doing. This way my chances are higher to get a bigger share.

So I chose even projects that have strict rules to participate in their bounties as long as they have great teams, great idea, and/or recommendations from authority figures.

Thinking about this now, I think that the most restrictive bounties I have seen were from a serious project. Scammers and projects interested only in money will not restrict their bounty program as they see this as their only chance to generate as much hype as they can with phony promises.

A few months ago some ICOs started to implement a verification, for bounty hunters, named KYC. This is something that was in place already for buyers on most ICOs. But it started to get implemented for bounty hunters as well. So I took the opportunity, prepared my documents needed for the verification and joined the bounties.

Still banking on that decision. :)

So take a look at programs that are strict. If you get in and deliver, most of the times it is worthed.

At 2018 start, for example, most avoided article bounties. So I got down to business. Each review took around 3 hours for me. On some bounties, I got up to a few hundred dollars in crypto for one article. If you do not know the price for a decent article with 500 words, it is around $10-$20. You might get some good articles with 500 words for as low as $5 on Fiverr, but you need to do some research before you find a decent article writer for that price.

I say that writing or even buying an article for a well-chosen bounty is a good investment.

To recap.

Research and select those project that looks like real businesses. Treat this selection as an investor would. Don’t avoid bounties just because they are restrictive with they rules as those bounties might return a high profit if you manage to deliver what they ask (hint: quality).

Bounties for Bitcointalk signature pay really good if you have a high authority account. The downside is that building a high authority account on bitcointalk will take months and a lot of quality posts.

Bounties for translators and writers tend to pay better. You can get down and dirty and start writing or you can order the articles from a place like Fiverr.

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Chapter 3 — How to grow your social media account to maximize bounty

increase your social media influence

When you do tasks for these bounty campaigns you are basically using your micro-influencer status on social media. Most of us that participate in these campaigns can’t be called influencers as we don’t have hundreds of thousands of followers. But if you got anywhere up to 10,000 marketing experts will name you a micro-influencer. The thing with micro-influencers is that they are cheaper to hire and they have better return ratio compared to (macro) influencers.

a) Reddit

I will start with Reddit. To be able to post on most crypto subreddits you have to increase your karma, both for posting and comments.

Karma on Reddit is an indicator of how useful is your content in the eyes of the community.

When people like or don’t like a post/comment on Reddit they can upvote or downvote. This has 2 effects. It affects your karma and how well is your content ranked inside Reddit.

To gain karma fast there are 2 ways that I’ve used with great success.
First is by posting content and commenting on subjects that you are knowledgeable. Make sure you know your stuff otherwise you will get downvoted pretty fast.

The second option is to post unique content on ‘funny’ subreddits. A few decent posts that are really funny will add karma to your account pretty fast.
Make sure to increase your comment karma as well. Some crypto subreddits ask for a minimum of ‘comment karma’ of +25.

Don’t spam, don’t repost content already shared. Follow Reddit rules.

Reddit can be a beast for other marketing purposes as well. Respect Reddit and you can bank with it in many ways. Maybe I will write about this sometime. Let’s get back to the purpose of this tutorial.

b) Facebook & Twitter

Each bounty has minimum requirements to be able to join their bounty. For Facebook and Twitter is the number of your followers. I’ve seen minimum requirements of 200, 500 even 1,000 followers.

To increase your following on these networks can be slow. There are extensive guides online on how to do that. I will point out a few good ways and a few ways to avoid.

You can build your audience posting relevant and useful content. Connect to other influencers. Once you have a relationship with them ask them to share some of your content, something that can be useful for their followers. This way it’s mutually beneficial. He gets new content for his followers and you get exposure and hopefully more followers.

Also, there are a few legit services where you can buy promotion on influencers accounts. Make sure the influencer account is genuine and it’s not just about numbers.

Another way is to spend money on ads on the same platform where you want to grow your following.

Avoid at all costs buying followers from Fiverr and other places. All of those are fake followers. There is a high chance that those followers will disappear and that your account will get restricted. Also, your account will look spammy, because there will be no engagement as the followers are fake.

If you want a profile with thousands of followers, just for the numbers, it’s cheaper to post in a couple of dating groups. If you are a girl, you will get +5000 friend requests in 2–3 days. Again, this is not something that I advise as these won’t provide any value for the content you will share with your followers, thus no value for the projects you promote.

Not that easy to convert horny guys into crypto enthusiasts. The only thing in common for these groups is the enthusiasm. ;)

So avoid anything that is shady for the sole purpose of increasing your followers count. Some bounty programs will notice this and you may end up working for nothing in return.

c) Website and Youtube

Assuming that your content and/or videos are professional or at least decent there are a few things that you can do to build your audience faster.

The main thing from my point of view is a thing named SEO (search engine optimization). This is a fancy way of saying rank your content high in google. There are extensive SEO guides on how to do that. I will not go here into it as this is not the main purpose of this guide. I will leave a couple of link with guides on this topic.

Basically, there are things that you can do on-page to make your content friendly both for the user and for the search engine. Things like what you put in your title, in the description what keywords are you using and more. Plus there is an off-page part where you basically gather backlinks for your content.

This SEO thing can be applied both for articles and videos.

Check the Resources at the end of this article for SEO guides to get you started.

No matter if SEO is for you or not, I encourage you to share your articles and videos on social media. Remember what I was saying about Reddit being a beast? ;)

Also, comment on relevant blogs/forums/youtube/social media and where is appropriate share your link. Don’t spam. Add as much value with your comments as you can.

To recap.

Increase your presence on social media, interact with other influencers and build relationships as you would do in real life.

If you are planning to write articles get yourself a website. It’s a $60 investment per year, plus another $100–200 if you hire someone to set-it up for your. But it can bring you much more in return. Remember to share your articles on social media, especially on reddit if your content is really good.

Use your unique abilities, your marketing preferences and select accordingly the bounty programs.

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Chapter 4 — Best Bounty Platforms — the best places where you can find bounty programs

Bitcointalk Forum

From the beginning of the ICO bounty programs, they have been hosted on Bitcointalk forum. This is still a good source, although I found a one that I prefer. Will talk about that in a few moments.

What I like about bounty programs hosted on Bitcointalk is that most campaigns usually have detailed descriptions of their requirements and details about the program ‘contract’.

What I don’t like is that you won’t be able to filter the programs. All are under the same subforums. You can’t filter the programs based on how new or old are they. You can’t filter programs based on specific campaigns. For example, if I want to see only bounties for articles that finish in more than 10 days (so I have time to write my articles), I can’t do that on Bitcointalk. You have to go one by one to check their ending date.

All in all, Bitcointalk is still worthed to check, especially as some big projects hold their bounty programs there.

To participate in most bounties posted here you will have to have an account. So, go and register. Make 20–30 good posts once approved as you will want to grow your account from Newbie to at least Jr. Member status. Some programs accept only users with a certain status on the forum.

Bounty0x Platform

My recent favorite place for bounty hunting is the Bounty0x platform.
This is a platform that I have been following before they launched their ICO. I kept checking them from time to time as I saw they were planning for all the filters that Bitcointalk will never have.

Another plus for me with bounty0x is that they take away the pain of submitting KYC documents for each bounty program that asks for this verification. On bounty0x you complete your KYC once and that’s it. No matter if you join 1, 5 or 100 bounty programs, you won’t be bothered with the KYC verification. And that saved time can be spent now on doing bounties to bank hard.

If you decide to register on Bounty0x I appreciate if you will use my invite/referral code: 155594
It will be a recognition that this guide was useful.

Other platforms

There are other platforms as well. But since most post their programs on Bitcointalk and now more and more on Bounty0x, there aren’t many bounties on other platforms to choose from. However, I use them sometimes to search for new bounty programs. But most bounty programs that I participate are from Bounty0x now.

Bounty Managers List:

• Bounty Hunter
• Bountyhive
• Bounty0x
• ICO BOUNTY HUNT
• Bountyplatform
• icobounty
• ICOwatchlist
• Bitcointalk

To recap.

Bitcointalk and Bounty0x are the main platforms where companies post their bounty programs. I prefer Bounty0x. But I encourage you to check them both. You may develop a taste for one of them. Or you may use both of them if you have time to join a bunch of bounties to maximize your income.