Bounty for ICO. How to make money without a dime to spend

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Smart Progress

7 min readOct 21, 2017

Each project, launching its own ICO, makes a Bounty. It’s an incentive program for helping promote and advertise the ICO. The services are paid for by the project tokens, which one can either sell right away, or keep hoping for their higher rate in the future. And, what is most important, many of the Bounty-campaigns do not require any big work, you don’t have to run around trying to find investors for a kickback, all is much easier.

Let’s review which Bounty-campaigns most of projects have and how much one can earn on all this.

Types of Bounty-campaigns

1. Signatures on BitcoinTalk Forum.

BitcoinTalk Forum is the major place of promoting any ICO, because this is where crypto-investors from all over the world intercommunicate. It has local sections practically in all possible languages, and the monthly audience of the Forum, according to Similarweb, is up to 30 million visitors. That’s why all projects are trying to allocate more of their budget on advertising particularly inside this forum. And one of the most popular and effective ways to do it is a subscription campaign.

What is a Signature

Every Forum user can set in his profile a text message which will be automatically added to each of his posts on the Forum. ICO campaigns buy this place from the user and employ it as an advertisement. Thus, the user simply communicates on the forum, writes various comments and advertises some ICO at the same time.

How it works

There are some limitations on the Forum concerning the signature installed, depending on your rank. For example, if you have just registered on the Forum, you will not be able to use the bb tags in your signature, and the length of the signature will be limited to 50 characters. The rank in its turn depends on the “activity” indicator, and the activity is based on the number of posts made and the date of your registration. Activity can only increase by 14 points every 2 weeks. Most ICOs accept participants with the rank of “Jr. Member” and higher. To obtain this rank, you have to make 30 messages within 6 weeks.

Following this link, you will find all the information on ranks and limitations.

As a rule, projects allocate a certain percentage of the funds collected within the ICO for one or another Bounty-campaign. For example, within the SmartProgress ICO, we declared that we allocate 5% of all tokens sold for the Bounty program and 70% of Bounty’s total budget for the subscription campaign. These figures vary in different projects, depending on the amount collected and the number of Bounty-campaigns.

The total budget of a certain Bounty-campaign is divided by the number of participants. But there are some peculiarities here as well. The payment is not distributed equally, but according to your rank. It is usually credited once a week in the form of “shares” or “stakes”, and, the higher is your rank the more shares you earn.

Upon completion of the ICO, the total budget will be distributed by the following formula:

How much you can earn

The income in various Bounty programs is completely different, but on the average, a participant with the rank of “Member” (Activity: 60, Boosting time: 2.5 months) gets from participation in the subscription campaign about $500 per month.

Most ICOs require from the participants 10 posts a week. Suppose, you want to write meaningful messages and it takes you 10 minutes to make each post, then 10 messages will take you 100 minutes a week or 7 hours a month. The most surprising is that you can use as many accounts as you like, it’s not even forbidden by the Forum rules. You can register dozens of accounts, write 10 messages a week from each and get your $70 per hour.

2. Social Networks

To participate in this type of Bounty, you will need accounts in social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The accounts should look factual with a lot of live subscribers and your real activity. Of course, this is in ideal, but most participants create fake accounts with driven up friends and subscribers. It is for this reason that we didn’t include social networks in our Bounty-campaign. But still, Bounty in social networks remains one of the most popular campaigns after the signatures.

How it works

All you will be required to do is to subscribe to official ICO pages in social networks, to like every post and to repost or retweet it. What could be easier? You can participate with just one of your accounts simultaneously in a large number of ICOs, so you will not even have to create multiple accounts.

How much you can earn

Since participation in such campaigns is much simpler and requires almost no effort from the subscribers, their number is much larger than in the subscription campaigns. A big number of participants smears greatly the overall budget, and a participant can count on an income of about $20 per month. But you may participate in 50 campaigns simultaneously, in which case your income will amount to $1,000 per month.

3. Translation into a local language

This is where easy types have ended, now you’ll have to work. The third popular type of Bounty is translation from English into local languages.

What usually gets translated:

Announcement on the Forum
ICO Website
White Paper

Translators in the ICO Bounty-campaigns are the least used compared to other participants (signatures, social networks), so the total budget is divided into fewer people and the income of a translator for a full set of translations can make $500 and more.

Where to find a Bounty?

As was mentioned above, all projects must publish their ICO announcements on the BitcoinTalk Forum. They also publish their Bounty programs there in a special section — Bounties (Altcoins).

Risks

Before this moment everything looked great, didn’t it? Well, you don’t risk your money and in return you receive project tokens, which you can sell on the stock exchange right away, or become an investor of the project and wait for the price to jump up to the skies. But there are risks here, as not every ICO collects even the minimum amount necessary and in this case you don’t get anything. So, on the one hand, you haven’t invested your money, but you’ve spent your time and done the job that might remain unpaid.

I started translating just 2 weeks ago. I’ve translated 10 ANN threads, 4 Bounty threads, 5 websites and 6 Whitepapers within 2 weeks. I haven’t received anything yet. Because some of them haven’t started yet the ICO and some of them failed their ICO. I hope, you will succeed and I’ll get some tokens….

For this reason, before signing up for the first available Bounty-campaign that promises you fabulous wealth, you should approach the project from the investor’s point of view, since even if you don’t invest your money, you still invest your efforts and time, which is as valuable a resource as money.

After you have realized this, you may change your mind about working a whole month for a project that has neither a product, nor a distinct development plan, but claims that it intends to raise $1,000,000 for a “cloud-based decentralized neural network of marketplace of ubers on the blockchain” and give half to the Bounty participants.

Instead, turn your attention to projects with more moderate appetites, but with a finished product and a clear idea of development, such as SmartProgress, for example.

A few words about SmartProgress

Why do we think that SmartProgress is different from all other ICOs?

We’ve already got a finished product, having worked successfully for more than 5 years.
The Project has its vast audience, which grows with a doubling every year. At the moment, over 150,000 users have registered on SmartProgress, of which the 20,000 using the service on a regular basis.
The Project produces profit and it is constantly growing. At present, it makes $ 3,100 per month.
The Project got an international Grant from Startup Chile in the amount of $35,000 and even this small financial investment increased the monthly income of the Project by 3 times within just six months.
A relatively small “Hard cap” (limitation of the maximum amount of funds raised) — only $500,000. Today, all ICOs are competing who will manage to collect the largest amount. Projects put out sky-high sums of tens and hundreds million dollars, without even explaining what they need so much for. We chose another way. We are going to collect just as much as we really need to implement the outlined plan, which we described in our White Paper.